Conditioning and Maintaining a Slate Call

Just as you need to clean and maintain your turkey shotgun, you should ensure your slate call is properly conditioned and maintained this turkey season. As the name implies, friction calls like pot calls require proper friction between the slate and striker to make the right sounds to entice those big gobblers out in the woods. Using a little piece of an abrasive pad can make a world of difference in how your call sounds.

Slate calls are naturally smooth, be it natural slate, glass, crystal, or aluminum, especially when you have just unboxed a new call. So you want to rough up the slate before you first use the call to properly condition the call and keep maintaining the call as you use it. For a natural slate call, use a scouring pad like the one shown here to rough up the surface. While for harder materials like glass and crystal slate calls, you want a coarser 80-100 grit sandpaper or conditioning stone to help cut into the material.

For conditioning the surface work the abrasive with firm pressure of the whole call surface in a tight circlular pattern first. Then you want to go sand the surface side to side in one consistant pattern. After that just clean off the sanding grit with a quick puff of air or a dry rag. That way you have rougher surface that has sanding pattern that runs perpendicular to how you use the striker. The microridges created in the slate call will help make a better more consistent call as you work the striker on the surface.