AUGUSTA -- Ted Nassivera Jr. assembles turkey calls in his computer room in the afternoon. Deliberately, he puts pieces of glass and metal inside a black ring and glues them together. Once he's done that, it's off to the dining room, where he lays them out one by one on the dinner table before heading off to find his wife.

"And then I tell her, 'It looks like we're eating in front of the TV again tonight!'"

Nassivera said on Friday afternoon at the Augusta Civic Center, where he and his father, Ted Nassivera Sr., were plying their wares at the 28th annual State of Maine Sportsman's Show. "My dad will tell you, I don't even have a basement to work in."

But Ted Sr. does, and he spends hours upon hours crafting calls for spring turkey hunting -- latex calls that fit into your mouth and round calls fitted with metal that you strike a small stick against. No fancy machinery to speed the process and, best of all, no corporate America telling them how to build a better mousetrap.

Or, in this case, a better turkey call.

"We're just a Mom and Pop organization," said Ted Sr., the reigning Maine State Open calling champion. "Do we get paid for all the time we put in? No, but this is just a whole lot of fun."

Built from a desire to compete at turkey-calling competitions across the northeastern United States, where they've won numerous titles, the father-son tandem from South Glens Falls, N.Y., first crafted the calls for themselves. They'd give away unwanted ones to friends.

In 2000, they started selling them as TSN Turkey Calls. First it was a few here and there at sportsman's shows like this one or at calling competitions, and then regional sporting goods stores started asking them to fill larger orders. Ted Sr., 62, has since "retired" from active calling as the business blossomed last year. Ted Jr., 41, is a three-time champion of the Maine State Open -- including back-to-back in 2005 and 2006. He'll try for his fourth Maine title this afternoon at the Civic Center.

It wasn't always peaches and cream for the Nassiveras, however. At least not when it came to turkey-calling competitions in Maine.

"The first year we came up here, in 2002, we were awful," Ted Jr. said. "We finished last and next-to-last. It was so bad, I don't even know which one of us finished where.

"The following year, I won it. We changed our whole way of calling, our whole way of thinking about it."

But they didn't change their handcrafted calls.

They offer three varieties of turkey calls -- mouth calls, box calls and friction calls. Made of latex, mouth calls fit between your tongue and the roof of your mouth and use vibration to rattle reeds that produce a sound like a clucking hen. Box calls use a chalked handle that slides over a piece of wood to imitate the sound of a hen. Friction calls use a round base -- made of metal or glass -- that is scraped with a small stick known as a "striker." All parts are built by hand, and Ted Sr. builds his strikers from oak with carbon fiber tips.

These New Yorkers happened on Maine almost by accident. Ted Sr. was part of a hunting trip with a group of people from Vermont more than a decade ago. Hunting along the Golden Road, he shot a moose and declared he'd found his retirement home.

"I love Maine," he said, adding that he bought a lot that's still undeveloped near Moosehead Lake in 1997. "I've been coming back ever since."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com