Quiet Woodworking: In An Unquiet World
A new book by Norman Pirollo Design on the dichotomy of hand tool woodworking in a modern world.
Norman Pirollo Design
New book on the dichotomy of hand tool woodworking in a modern world. Discover how hand tools create a quiet, peaceful, dust free woodworking experience. Sacrifice some speed but attain a more fulfilling, better quality of craftsmanship. I delve into how my furniture pieces are created using hand tools. I discuss how we need to maintain a tradition of working with hand tools and more so in today’s environment where technology permeates our lives at every turn. Hand to eye coordination and tactile feedback are but two of the benefits from using hand tools in woodworking. I make a compelling case of introducing hand tools into woodworking. 180 pages.
Excerpt from Foreword: “The premise of this book is the dichotomy of hand tool woodworking in a modern world. I delve into how working with hand tools might appear antiquated and anachronistic, but the merits disprove this. Woodworking with power tools and machines have become normalized over the past century. Our lives are rapidly being overtaken with technology that thinks for us and performs the labor-intensive tasks we were once accustomed to. Machines bring an inordinate amount of noise and dust into our lives. This is the consequence of introducing expediency to our woodworking. Advancements in technology are viewed as progress, but our minds and bodies have perhaps not kept up. Our bodies were designed to move and work. Hand to eye coordination is a trait developed over thousands of years. We are moving away from this by having technology overtake our daily lives. It is unlikely we will ever return to our former lives where tasks were hand powered. We need to strike a balance in our lives between progress and maintaining tradition. This can occur through hand tool woodworking. There is much to be said of how woodworking was performed in earlier times.”
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