My first attempt at making my own pot call

[RMP]

So I've been wanting to make a pot call out of materials native to my state of Virginia.  I'm not a wood worker.  And I'm certainly not a stone mason.  Nonetheless, I wanted a slate call made from my slate I collected here in my own state.  So I collected a few slabs of black slate in the hills of Appomattox, Virginia.  Taught myself how to split it, more or less.  And ended up with pieces I could thin and grind into a sound board and playing surface.  I did end up buying a pre-made Holly wood pot.  Holly is ubiquitous here in my state and I like the near pure-white color.  So after many mistakes, and a lot of thinning with a concrete grinder on my angle grinder, and some grinding on a sacrificial grinding disc to make make it round, I ended up with a 2.5" sound board and a 3.4", more or less, surface piece.  This is how it turned out.  Be gentle - I've never tried this before.













Some sound...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCU91zjk_tU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZrIU_61YgM

[Spurtaker]

With a little practice I believe you can call a turkey with it. No turkeys sound alike. For your first time and all your efforts I believe you did well. Keep calling and just wait, he'll come.


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[RMP]

Thanks.  I comfort myself by knowing it doesn't sound any worse than some turkey sounds that I've heard come out of actual turkeys. 

I've been working with it.  I've tried many different strikers:  the unknown wood in the videos, carbon, acryllic, rosewood, purple heart, hickory...  So far, hickory plays it best and that's what I will use. 

[g8rvet]

That is really cool you made it from local slate.   Would love to hear it played.

[hpo]

Badassery!

[RMP]

That is really cool you made it from local slate.   Would love to hear it played.

There's a couple of Youtube links above showing how it sounds.  Not really sure how to post the videos on his forum:

https://youtu.be/JCU91zjk_tU?feature=shared

https://youtu.be/-ZrIU_61YgM?feature=shared

This was the piece I ended up fashioning into the sound board.  It was too small to use as the surface slate.  But it was really thin and was relatively easy to grind into a disk.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBFiBxW-wt4

I learned a little about slate. The lighter colored grain in the dark slate are apparently quartz crystals. These crystals form in or on the slate and gives slate its layers, called "foliations." It is along the foliations that slate generally splits.

The problem with the slabs I collected was that they weren't split off.  They broke off.  The difference, it seems to me, is that splitting will generally give you layers that run parallel to the length of the piece.  My broken pieces have layers that run diagonally through the pieces I collected.  So it was hard to split of a piece from the slab that had an area big enough to grind flat and still have enough area to use as the surface piece.  I tried splitting off pieces to use, but never got one really big enough.  So I got the bright idea to whack a slab with a hammer and see what came off.  What I got was the piece in the top picture.  So it didn't split cleanly along the foliations. The foliations in the piece I used run diagnonally though the piece from top to bottom. So that quartz in the foliations is visible on the surface. It makes it so I cannot get a very smooth surface because when I sand it, I can still feel ripples in the surface as if either the slate or the quartz is getting more sanded away than the other. The diagnonal foliations through the slab also made it so that when I ground it into a disc, some of the runs in the slate between the foliations got very thin. The thinner they got, the more likely it was they would flake off. So I ended up with a piece that isn't uniformly thick, and edges that has flake knocked off.  By the way, those flakes are razor sharp and I had a small one pierce my leather glove and stick me in the finger.

[g8rvet]

They sound good.  A high note that ends in a rasp, if that makes sense.  Much different from a production slate, which is good. 

Sounds like you are learning the game.  I saw a guy that made square box calls too and they sounded really good.  He had made a "rustic turkey striker" on youtube and that is where I found it.

[Yoder409]

Pretty freakin' impressive.........starting with a rock !!!

That call will hunt & kill.   Yep.

[bornagain64]

Nice job. We found some pieces of wood in or local woods and made a couple calls from it- but you have
Taken it to another level. 

[RMP]

Thanks for the kind and encouraging words!

[Tnandy]

Great accomplishment, congrats on your call. Keep us posted when you get one with it. That is awesome

[Lcmacd 58]

Thats sounds really good .... very nice work

[Osceola352]

Pretty neat

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