I am by no means an expert but have been doing a lot of experimenting with strikers over the last year and wanted to share some advice that you may find helpful if you are doing the same thing.
Rather than go out and buy a bunch of $20 strikers (many of which you will not like), build your own 2 piece strikers with a bunch of different types of wood until you find the woods you like and then you can order higher end turned strikers or just decide the 2 pieces work for you. Google "turkey call making supplies" and "exotic wood dowels" and a number of suppliers will come up. You can buy ready made tops for about $1 and dowels for the bottom for $0.35 to around $3.00, depending on the wood. So for the cost of a single turned striker, you can try around 10 different woods.
Some places sell the dowels with the ends already rounded, but if not there is an easy way to do it. At first, I chucked them into a drill and used a piece of sandpaper to round but quickly discovered that the dowels are not straight and would wobble making it impossible to shape the end evenly. The fix was to drill a hole in a 2x4 a little bigger than the dowel. Clamp the 2x4 to something solid, chuck the dowel and just stick the end through the hole and use sandpaper to shape end. Basically, you are letting the drill wobble and not the end of the dowel. I then sand entire dowel with fine sandpaper while chucked.
I prefer turned strikers with beveled ends and find that they will sound slightly differently than the 2 pieces, but the 2 piece strikers were instrumental in helping me narrowing my choices.
Hope you find this helpful.
