I buy all of my glass from Stumpy here on OG.
I buy my slate from Penn Big Bed Slate.
I buy my aluminum from Grassy Creek.
Google Penn Big Bed and Grassy Creek for email and websites.
I use only Goop plumbers glue for my soundboards and surfaces. Any gluing up of wood to wood I use Titebond III. Polyeurethane glues have a foam buildup on the glue joints that requires cleanup, and it's just messier to use.
You can search here on OG for people's favorite wood for calls. Walnut and cherry have long been standards for pot calls and will make good sounding calls.
Pot call sizes and dimensions are generally determined by the size of the call surface used. You can pretty much figure adding 1/2"-3/4" to the size of your surface to get your rough blank size. I generally cut my blanks to rough size on a power miter saw, then cut to round on a bandsaw before mounting them on the lathe.
I use a piece of the surface material for the specific call I'm turning to mark the top side of my blank while mounted on the lathe. The only measuring device I use to turn the inside of my pots is my parting tool (lathe tool I use to remove the waste wood from the inside of the pot and shape the internals) and a doubled piece of soundboard material as a gauge to determine the height of my pedestal. To make your pedestal gauge, take 2 pieces of your soundboard material and glue them together face to face with super glue. To use this gauge, you place it on your pedestal when you think you are close to the right height and slide it towards one outside edge of the inside of the pot. As a general rule of thumb, your pedestal height should be about 2 soundboard thicknesses shorter than the ledge that holds your surface material.
Again, do some google searches and searches here on OG to get more basic ideas.
I had never used a lathe before trying to turn calls. I learned from trial and error and God's help. I probably went through about 120 pot blanks before I hit on the combination that I liked the sound and feel of. Figure that at around $2 per pot blank and about 1-2 hours per pot in the early days.
Write down your measurements and any changes you make as you go. Write your observations about the sound of the call. Make mental note of how your tools react to different woods. Learning from your own experiences will be much more valuable than just reading step by step instructions. Doing this will help you learn what small changes can make in the sound of your calls. It will also help you learn what changes you can make to achieve a bit different sound. It's amazing the change that adding or removing 1/16" thickness from a single dimension of a call pot can make in the sound.
