Cafeoutdoors.com: Been in the shop some lately....

Been trying to find time to get to the basement when possible lately.

Have been working on a few things that we are having fun with.

First, we started doing some acrylic in limited items. It is an entirely different experience from wood but pretty much a necessary item to do to get where we want to be.

We initially worked on our Line Boy and Dub'l Dab'lr barrels and got them where we wanted them and then produced a mid-range double reed insert to go with them. From that point, we sent them off and have been working with a company and have had molds made for poly production. We have samples in hand of them and have received the first 20 inserts which are all clear except a couple black ones.

The nice thing about the molding process we are using is you pretty much can't tell the difference between these and acrylic turned pieces. We are not trying to pass them off as acrylic, but the majority of the poly calls that you see have mold lines and injection ports in them from where the poly is poured into the molds. The process the company uses where we are getting ours done uses a different process and there are very limited mold imperfections. This gives a really nice clean product that we think stands out above those others.

We hope to have the entire order of barrels and inserts within the next two weeks and have them ready to go. This will also allow us to offer a wider variety of colors than the standard poly inserts you see around. We have Clear, Smoke, Black, Mallard Green, Orange, Blue and Ivory coming on the first batch.

We have also started making limited quantities of short reed goose calls. We are doing both wood and acrylic barrels and only acryic inserts for these. We were selling wood barrels with poly inserts from Echo but are going to go to our own acrylic inserts exclusively on those for this time. We might mold our own poly inserts down the road on these too, but have enough on the table at this time as it is.

Here is a photo of some of the calls -

The calls on both ends are Hedge with the Echo poly inserts. These should be the last ones that go out the door with the commercial inserts from another manufacturer.

The others are from left to right - Cocobola Line Boy double reed with our clear insert...Bocote Dub'l Dab'lr with our clear poly insert...Diamondwood Lil Dab'lr with our clear poly insert...Clear Acrylic Lil Dab'lr with our Black poly insert...Green Acrylic Lil Dab'lr with our limited open water Yellow Acrylic insert...Black metallic Acrylic barrel with our Red metallic Acrylic insert Canada Call'r short reed goose (this was a one time make and is on my lanyard)...Bocote barrel with a Yellow Acrylic insert short reed goose...Cocobola barrel with a Yellow Acrylic insert short reed goose.

Here is a close up of the duck calls and the goose calls.