Watch a young local outdoorsmen leaning over a whirring lathe, plastic shavings flying in front of protective goggles, and you see a labor of love, someone who wants to make an impact on waterfowl hunting.

Robert Minvielle Jr. looks right at home working inside a small building that is the birthplace of True South Custom Calls. The New Iberia outdoorsman makes and sells the handcrafted duck calls.

It’s a skill he taught himself. Judging from the duck call’s early popularity and sales in his first year of business, Minvielle taught himself well.

“Yeah. Oh, yeah. It gets lots of compliments,” he said.

How popular? He walked into the New Iberia Ducks Unlimited Chapter Banquet on Oct. 26 at the Isle of Iberia RV Resort with 27 duck calls and left with 5, he said, most of them sold to DU members around his age.

Minvielle, 20, shared another recent story: A pro staffer for another duck call brand in the region purchased two different duck calls, one of them a True South Custom Calls model, at Lafayette Shooters.

“He walks out and blew mine. He walked back in and returned the other,” he said, proudly, noting the rep said Minvielle’s call “blows the others out of the water.”

His success can be attributed to his attention to detail, which he demonstrated by turning a block of acrylic into a colorful duck call on Jan. 12, and while working nights to make an average of five duck calls in five hours.

He started hunting ducks when he was young, so he’s familiar with duck calls and how to use them when the time is at hand in the woods, marsh or rice fields. He was blowing Duck Commanders, manufactured since 1972 by the well-known Robertson family, led by patriarch Phil Robertson, in West Monroe.

After so many years, the expense pinched the budget of a high school student/athlete who graduated from Catholic High School (Class of 2021). He played baseball for the Panthers.

“I didn’t want to pay $100 for one of those fancy duck calls. I thought to myself, ‘I’ll make one of my own,’ ” he said.

With that in mind as he approached his 20th birthday last February, Minvielle watched a video of someone making a handmade duck call and was intrigued.

“I just said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ I asked my grandfather, Danny David Sr., for a lathe,” he said.

He got a WEN Benchtop Lathe for his birthday and went to work learning the ins and outs of shaping wood and acrylic blocks into handsome, effective duck calls.

“From there I just taught myself what I wanted to do. I really wanted to get the hang of it and get the best product out there,” Minvielle said.

“It took a lot of self-learning. There’s not many tutorial videos of how to make duck calls. I learned the hard way. I spent two months just practicing, making my own wood duck calls. Then I got into acrylics. It was a challenge,” he said

His parents, Robert Sr. and Kristi Minvielle, backed his business venture from the start, he said.

“They were surprised. They were leery at first. (But) they saw I really wanted to do it, saw that I liked it and they were really supportive,” he said.

Minvielle puts in long hours in the shop in addition to studying toward an industrial technology degree at SLCC, where classes just restarted, and working as a memorialist at David’s Marble and Granite. Nevertheless, he has sold more than 200 duck calls in less than a year.

Duck call manufacturing has eaten up his fishing and hunting time. He used to hunt ducks both days every weekend but this season his lone notable trip was opening weekend with his father, Drake Landry, Cody Richard and Bubby Broussard near Gibson, where they limited out on grays and blue-winged teal.

Now he spins that lathe and prepares for the next day mostly six days a week, including 5 p.m. to midnight weekdays after he gets off from David’s. It is time-consuming because it takes about 45 minutes per one acrylic True South Custom Call and approximately 30 minutes to make a wooden model.

While Minvielle works, he’s usually listening to Hank Williams Jr. or Cody Cannon and Whiskey Myers.

Is there a difference in sound for wood and acrylic models? Minvielle said wood duck calls sound a little raspier while acrylic calls have a little more range.

“Wood you can make nice. But you don’t get the fancy colors,” he said, adding wooden models are carved from Chechen, a tropical hardwood, Zebrawood, a hardwood from West Africa, and African blackwood from central and southern Africa.

Acrylic is a different animal, so to speak, to work with, he said, noting its density is very compact and requires more sanding steps, i.e., eight different grains from 80 to 2000. Wet sanding, at that, for all.

One 3-inch long acrylic block costs $7.50. A 42-inch long high-quality acrylic cylindrical rod, which can make 12 ducks, costs $135.

Other expenses, aside from sandpaper, include inserts that vary from $10 to $15 apiece. He puts each new duck call in a Bottomland Camo “Call Bag,” each $20.

“I can get a single reed or double reed,” he said about the inserts, noting he favors the sound of a double reed.

On the lathe, he first drills a 5/8-inch hole through the center of either the wood or acrylic block (7/8-inch hole for goose calls). Then on the square acrylic or wood blocks he uses a gouge to take off the flat edges and make them cylindrical.

Next he uses the necessary tools to add curves and grooves. Then he uses eight 5- x 5/8-inch sandpaper strips on acrylic models starting at 80 and ending at 2000.

“After 80, I always make sure there are no scratches or chips,” he said, adding the finer grains won’t eliminate such imperfections.

True South Custom Calls first appeared last year at Gulotta’s in New Iberia, he said. However, they were introduced them there long before the duck hunting season, too early, in hindsight.

Minvielle’s product has enjoyed much more success just before and during this duck hunting season at Lafayette Shooters, an outfitters store that opened in 1967.

“Lafayette Shooters is selling out (his duck calls) so quick. Like a week later, they’ll call and tell me to bring 10 more,” he said.

His immediate goal is to get his duck calls on the shelves at Bowie Outfitters in Baton Rouge. His link would be the aforementioned pro staffer for another duck call brand who also deals with Bowie Outfitters.

If Bowie Outfitters makes an order for True South Custom Calls, it probably would call for 150 duck calls, according to Minvielle.

His long-range goal is to purchase a CNC Lathe, which would help mass produce the duck calls. That’s definitely farther down the road as a quick Google check shows the cost of CNCs from $2K-12K on a hobby level and on the professional level $15K-30K.