How to Make a Duck Call: The Barrel

my name's Eric lassen and this is how to make a call so for the first stage of making the duck call what are you gonna start with what do you do so you take a block wood this one is pre-staged I've laminated together you need to put a 5/8 hole in the middle all calls that you can buy online are 5/8 centered holes with drill bits and that's for why are you making that hole that is where the insert of the duck call will go okay so this is a tree branch that we cut off I've pre-drilled it gonna get ready to shave it down to this size to stage them up to get ready to put the band on then we'll work on shaping get the final size to get the final cut for the duck call good one this could be up your duck call this just like that that's the different call shape so then after this after you you make all those cuts then you're gonna go into the shaping process right right so now what do we have over here so I got this special band I'll show at the end of the light it's a u.s. half dollar pressed to specific measurements from a guy that I found on eBay and this will fit perfectly around this one that I've already shaved down it's gonna go all the way up in here because it's a coin and this edge is not even I'm going to tuck it up inside the call epoxy glue it let it sit and that'll sit on there nice and snug and then have our backing and then we'll work on a bubble shave it down and get a nice smooth even Larry layer for the lip so let's get to work so what is this machine right here so this is a wood lathe that I actually bought on Amazon it's a wet wood working lathe 8 inches by 12 inches and so you have adjustable speeds you're on that's at very very low speed I stood now and that's that's gonna shave your call into the size and her exact shape that you want it right so this is a special bit here this bit this bit is called an expanding mandrel two and five-eighths expanding mandrel this is just a replacement piece bought this off line as well and this goes into the hole after you drill it you'll push it on there and then the very end of this is an allen wrench that expands out when you do this so now after time you can't tuck it off and it's safe so this is basically just tightening that on there curls yeah so this this sits snug now if you're doing bigger shapes than this this is exactly how you would do it you would snugging in tighten it down and now it's gonna spin evenly on an axis but because duck calls are smaller but it's easier to work without this end piece and have it free because the mandrel end is only right here so you don't have to worry about so if you don't use this piece it's basically gonna be super wobbly if you have a long if you're working with a long piece of wood yeah if you're gonna make a nice Club or something a mini baseball bat you'd want and then piece but when you're roughing when you're doing the roughing gouge and bringing it down to a nice workable size you'll have this piece in the end there so okay so what have you done to this part of the call so far I've taken this giant tool and picture this like this and I've taken it and as it spins I've shaved it down to a nice smooth Center and the ideal thing to do is when this gets up and going you want to be able to put this on here so if I put this piece on there it's obviously going to be uneven and wobbly and this makes it a nice easy working surface I did not shave it down perfectly smooth because once again you need to leave the most amount of material to get more detail into there so this is a good starting point because once I have the band that I want to use I have multiple different types you can use a brass band you can use a half coin you can use a piece of PVC pipe you can use duct tape whatever you want to use but once you establish what size this is then that's your working distance from the inner side or the inside to the outside all right Eric what you doing you see this [Music] there we go let's roll let's do it [Music] [Music] what we got now is we've fixated the lowest point right here on the call so most calls go from a little knock point where the band rests against then a giant bubble kind of goes down and then this is gonna be the mouth in here so I picked my lowest point here we're gonna work up a bubble build it and then take it down to this this spot right here this is going to be the NOC point for the band when it says [Music] [Applause] [Music] this age of the call and it has some sort of shape and form just go over like the techniques that you use in order to get those shapes so you take the tool right here and you can see I was sliding it into this into the lowest point that I wanted right here and that's what you need to really establish is where you want the lowest point because once you take the material away you obviously can't put it back so I left this little little spot here specifically we're gonna burn a line in here and then that's going to be a piece of detail but then when you're doing your yorkers you want to start here and then work this way so you're working it around but then to keep the bulge you need to almost work at this angle and you're pushing like this and let the material go away don't don't overdo it and then this specifically this gap right here I took the tool and I pressed it and then I found it in and fanned it out and that's how you get this V now what what the ideal thing to do is you want to leave as much detail as possible because they're custom calls so you try to try to do something different every time it but also leave your mark so I try to do something along this line and then we'll also burn a line right here so it's gonna have two marks right here in here and then next after that we're going to work on the mouth we're gonna pull it off flip it around and work on the other [Music] all right so now that we got the shape here we're all done with carving it on this end now we're going to turn it around and shape it this way mainly because this piece right here will get in the way if I try to do it so just pull it off and flip it around and start to work on the mouth the key with the mouth is to make sure that it's something that you would want rather than something that looks cool so you want to make it functional let's make the guard in place and you can see it's kind of a fountain looking it's growing upwards so we're probably going to come out and just shave off the ends right here work this down maybe a little bit s because of angle this way we're gonna take it down probably coming up straight and then flare it out in the lips make it easy alright okay so now we're gonna come in from the end and just make sure that the top part is all nice and smooth and come in in here open up the hole a little bit and then also work on this tight end right here and then we'll be just fine [Music] okay so we have that all squared away and the last thing to do is gonna be flip it back around we're gonna put the band on glue that on there make sure that it's all snug up and then we'll start to sand it and get ready to go for the final seal coating Oh so basically what I did is I took the half-dollar and I jammed pressed it on there you notice that when it started basically I took and I flared out edges to create some rough stuff rough the inside of this use epoxy on it and now I'm just going to take this and just shave off the end to knock it up and then we're gonna read glue again it doesn't matter if glue gets all over the place because we're gonna sand all that away so here we go all right so the final stage you sandpaper you can use sand blocks like these you can use a lot of anything to sin abrasive knitting find this on Amazon pretty cheap stuff cut some strips like this which were these pads you're supposed to put it on these beds as you can see in the picture what I do is I just cut them into long strips like you can see here I have everything from a tee all the way up to 600 so before I get going I try to just stage it out that way when I try to figure out which one I need next so we're gonna start with the you don't necessarily need to do 80 or 100 but I have them here just in case to knock off some large pieces of the glue that might be there and then usually start about 120 and move all the way up to 600 and then you want to use 600 especially around this mouthpiece on the end to make sure it's nice and smooth so let's get rolling basically just knock off the large chunks of blew that letter falling off with the eighty to a hundred establishing please make sure they're still there [Music] they want you guilty [Music] so you can see we took it out and re-establish this notch right here got the groove back now I'm gonna start this is 80 now we're gonna start with the hundred work our way up to 600 [Music] all right so the call is basically all smoothed out down to 600 you can see it's nice and smooth and shiny we worked the inside of the call a little bit but made sure that the mouth was nice and smooth I'm gonna have to touch up this end a little bit this is where the glue came out and then some sawdust in there so you just touch it with a loop the edge of the blade and will sharpen it up and then the end result will stay in it seal it and here you go seal this bad boy you can use anything from superglue mineral oil tungsten oil we're gonna throw the tung oil finish on this low gloss you can see here just something to seal it with make sure the key with the duck calls though is that you want to seal the inside so after you get it in there and shove it halfway through and then make sure that the inside gets some love as well then you can see under the nice beautiful light it's gonna really make the two-tone pop the detail good as well so this one we're gonna let sit and dry for about about the night maybe a little longer and we'll put it next to the next calls that we've done so here's the view of some of the other calls that we have this piece of piece of wood specifically started out like this you can see the two this one has the half-dollar ring as well with a little bit of detail on the middle for your lanyard and then this is going to be the next the next time this is epoxy with wood so you can see it's spun down ready to apply the band and then we're gonna work another call so you can see this call right here this is a piece of PVC pipe that came onto maple so when it was maple then we stained it and put them put the band on there to tone down the PVC pipe coloring to make it look more rustic this is a piece of cocobolo with a copper pipe so we took a copper pipe and we cut it down to this size shoved it on there and then did just a standard call this is one of the first calls that I did let's see you can see this one's PVC piping as well PVC is very easy to do this one right here is another copper pipe on a piece of dogwood I want to say that had a nice knot on the side but you can see the one burn mark and the detail around the mouth as well this is Diamond wood so this is just a simple call without a band Diamond wood you can buy online at anything and it's basically just sheets of laminated wood that's been stained and put together this is another one that we did where it's a chunk of cocobolo with maple in the middle so we took three like this rather than gluing it in the diamond pattern if we would have glued this to the side that's how you would make this call here with a standard brass band so those are all the other ones there's much much more and then what are you what type of inserts are you putting in these these inserts you can go on Echo calls comm and I think these are the open water additions or the timber and then you can buy you can see here you have a choice of green smoke black and this one I'm pretty sure is amber and what size again are those these are all the standard 5/8 diameter right here so that's why your hole has to be 5/8 in order for this to work so find a chunk of wood drill a 5/8 hole and you can make anything at all [Music]

Channel: INTO THE MARSH

Views: 7,521

Rating: 4.8202248 out of 5

Keywords: how, to, make, duck, call, ducks, mallard, dux, lathe, wood, working, carving, barrel, the, drake

Id: 0pczYlKF7IM

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020