Trent gives us a few quick pointers on keeping your pot call sounding good through the spring!
Trent Snyder here from Cartel Custom Calls. Just wanted to give you a little tip about conditioning pot calls. We send all of our pot calls out with two strikers and a conditioning pad of 150-grit sandpaper. A lot of guys like 220 but it depends on how picky you are about it, but the 150 works just fine.
Typically, I try to not condition the striking surface. I try to keep my hands off of it. The oils off of your hands can fill the pores in the call, it makes it soft, so that you cannot call on it. Very good. If you want to just condition the end of your striker and give it a good twist on that 150-grit sandpaper, and then put it right there on that aluminum, see how it sounds.
Some guys, they sit down and the call sounds like an old hand brushing her teeth, and they just they grit the ever-loving heck out of it. I don't typically like to do that. I mean, maybe once a week I do, I'll give that a good little scuff up there. When you're conditioning, say this crystal call, you can really give it to it if you want, and you can condition that call down good, and it's not going to wear the surface down near as fast as something like a slate.
The slate, if you really condition that in that same sweet spot all the time, you're really going to wear that surface area down, and it's going to wear your call out a lot faster than you want it to. As long as you keep the oils off of that call, just conditioning the end of that striker will do all that you need to, and it'll go right there and it'll do all the calls that you want for this turkey season.