How It StartedOne Duck Call, 18 Hunters, Limited Out by 10 a.m.

I started using a cut-down D2 Olt back in 1982. One morning, Steve Schultz and I got to our spot early and set the decoys. Daylight broke with ducks everywhere, and off in the distance we heard this one call. It sounded like a whole flock, it sounded real, and it was followed by volley after volley of gunfire.

We didn't kill a duck that day. We couldn't compete. I was running a Hambone wooden call, Steve had a wooden Richentone, and we both thought we were good callers. We were no match.

Turned out it was one man and one call: Lester Capps, running a backward keyhole Olt. He worked the same job as Steve and me at the White Bluff Power Plant in Redfield. He had 18 people with him that morning and they limited out by 10 o'clock. His call sounded like a hen mallard and the ducks came from every direction.

Lester Capps, a true master of the cut-down. He ran a backward keyhole Olt and opened my eyes to the power of the call.

So a friend of mine, Bruce Bond, a gunsmith at Jim's Trading Post in Pine Bluff, cut down an Olt and brought it to me. I blew it and it was instant success. It took a lot of air, but the extra effort was worth it. I've run cut-downs exclusively ever since, almost 40 years now.

I started guiding duck hunters in the public timber of Arkansas in 1981. I used my cut-down every day, got more accustomed to it, and it gave me an edge over the hunters around me. My customers saw the results and wanted one. So I started cutting calls for customers, then friends, then people were showing up at my camp to buy a cut-down Olt.

Building My OwnThe KM Custom Cut

I called Jim Olt, put together a written agreement to buy his calls and modify them, and started cutting Olt calls down. From there I kept going, trying different cuts and making more precise modifications.

Eventually I developed my own call, the KM Custom Cut keyhole, with a threaded barrel and threaded insert. It's turned on a lathe, threaded, and the insert is profiled with a keyhole. I ream the mouthpiece, slope the barrel's inner portion, and invert the keyway. I cut the tone board by hand with four types of files and three grits of sandpaper. The result is a smooth, crisp, user-friendly cut-down that's very loud, a true fit with zero tolerances and a secure insert.

When I started developing these calls in 2011, I'd already spent 15 years thinking about it. I looked at every call worth taking to the woods, studied each one, and found the flaws. My goal was to build a call without them, one that's the only call you need.

The WhyWhat Makes a Cut-Down Different

A cut-down is a duck call with the tone board cut and reshaped from its original design. That change in how air moves through the call gives it a louder, raspier, more aggressive sound with more realism and variety. It cuts through wind and cover better than a traditional call, which is exactly what you need in dense timber or heavily pressured public water where ducks are wary.

From a public-land standpoint, it's the only call I'll use. It has a proven track record of bringing mallards to the decoys consistently, and that's the whole job.

The RootsBorn in the Bayou Meto Timber

Cut-downs came out of the older Olt D-2 calls. Hunters in the dense timber and flooded woods of Arkansas, places like the Cache River, Bayou Meto, and the Wabbaseka Scatters, found the stock D-2 too quiet and the wrong tone for those woods. So they cut the tone board down and reshaped it, making the call louder and raspier and far better at pulling ducks from a distance.

That's the tradition these calls come from, and it's the tradition I've spent my life carrying forward. I still think about duck hunting obsessively, and I'll hunt cut-downs until the day I die.