Cluck Yeah: A Slate Turkey Call Project

Students

Screen Shot 2019-05-04 at 5.24.43 PM - Parker Dixon

Zach Kelly
ORFE, 2020

Screen Shot 2019-05-04 at 5.24.33 PM - Parker Dixon

TJ Floyd
ORFE, 2020

Screen Shot 2019-05-04 at 5.24.17 PM - Parker Dixon

Parker Dixon
ORFE, 2020

Project Description

We engineered Slate Turkey Calls as good as any on the current market. In order to create a unique aesthetic design, we used an appropriate hard wood with a distinctive grain and density which will allow for better acoustics. A slate turkey call consists of 2 main parts: the friction enhanced body and the striker which is used to scratch the slate on the body to emulate the unique sound of a real-life turkey. In nature, turkeys communicate with a series of clicks and gobbles. Naturally, male turkeys (gobblers) send out a series of gobbles as they sit in their roost. The female turkeys (hens) respond with a series of clicks. The hen then approaches the location of the gobbler as they communicate throughout her journey. With a slate turkey call, one attempts to emulate these clicks. The clicks from the call must sound so irresistible to the gobbler, that he is convinced to leave his roost in pursuit of this flirting hen (us).

Technical Background

Slate turkey calls, otherwise known as friction turkey calls, consist of two parts: the striker and the body. The striker is a wooden tool that essentially looks like a screwdriver, with a handle and a thinner part with a flat end. The shape is made to be easily held, and the harder the wood, the louder the sound it will produce. The body is a circular wooden tool with a slate insert to rub the striker on. The hardness of the surrounding wood again affects the loudness of the call, with harder wood making the sound louder.
There are multiple sounds that can be made using this item and are dependent on user proficiency. The sounds are made by the friction created by dragging the thin end of the striker across the surface of the body with varying angles, speeds, and pressures, essentially making a more controlled “fingernails on a chalkboard” type sound. To use correctly, the user holds the striker much like a pencil, and is essentially drawing on the slate with the thinner end of the striker with slightly different techniques to get different sounds. The four main types of sounds made with this tool are the cluck, the yelp, the cut, and the purr. The yelp sound is made by holding the striker angled away from the user’s body at an approximately 20 degrees from perpendicular angle to the surface of the body, and “drawing” small ovals on the slate. Holding the striker slightly more perpendicular, applying more pressure, and moving the striker faster will produce a cut sound. With a cut, the striker is almost hopping across the surface, whereas making a yelp, the striker will never lose contact with the body. A cluck sound is made by doing the same motion as a cut, except with slightly less pressure and thus less friction between the surfaces. A purr is made by using the same technique as a yelp, except with more pressure from the striker. The yelp and cut sounds together, as well as the purr and cluck sounds, emulate a female turkey looking for a mate, thus attracting male gobblers.

CallExample Picture (For Background reference):
From: https://www.opticsplanet.com/maestro-butski-series-the-composer-slate-friction-turkey-call.htm

Design Drawings

Fabrication Process

For our EPICS project this semester, we made a slate turkey call and the striker that is used with it to create the sound. There are different types of turkey sounds that can be made with different techniques, and those can be found in the project background. In terms of the fabrication process, however, there were 3 main parts of the call that we had to create and assemble. The first piece is the body, which is the cylindrical wooden piece that has a circular slate piece in it. We made the body in the Carvey machine, after designing a model in the easel software. We fabricated a total of three bodies in the Carvey machine, making improvements in the model each time. The body is a hollow cylinder with seven holes in the bottom, and the top is covered by a piece of slate, which we ended up ordering online. Our first body prototype, made with leftover wood, had a stand in the middle for the slate to rest on, but we neglected to create an outer rim to also support the slate when we glued it on. For this model, we did not actually attach the slate at all. Furthermore, we painted the wood with a dark wood stain to help the aesthetics. After revising the model, the body second prototype, made with the more sturdy and expensive cocobolo wood, ended up being off center due to a miscue with the Carvey machine. We attached the slate to the body with wood glue anyways, and the call is still functional, just less aesthetically pleasing than a well-executed model. For our third and final model, this time made with hard maple, had all the correct parts and was carved without any problems. We used a wood finish to make it look a bit better before attaching the slate with super glue.

The other part of the project was the striker, which is rubbed against the slate on the body to create a turkey sound. We made two total strikers. For the prototype, we used cocobolo wood again on the lathe. We looked up multiple professionally-made strikers online and modeled ours after those. The first one had a fairly thick handle, and the tip was rounded. We used sandpaper to smooth the wood out, but we used no wood stain after completing the lathing. The final product has a much thinner handle, and the tip flares out much more than the first prototype. We used sandpaper again, and on this one we used a wood stain.

In total we made two strikers and three bodies, and only attached the slate to the second prototype and the final product. We used the lathe, the Carvey machine, and the easel software to create the body and the striker.

Students

Project Description

Technical Background

Design Drawings

Fabrication Process

Final Result