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stone and health (WAS Informazioni)

Stone Conversations : Archive 1 : Message 00250

From: Walter Arnold <walter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 19:42:03 -0500
Subject: stone and health (WAS Informazioni)

At 10:45 PM 9/2/99 +0200, Cristina Cavasonza wrote:

Quoted text begins.fingers not only with eyes, forms and volumes. To avoid
health problems, it's better work in the most human way:
chisel and hammer, no pneumatic one.
End of quote.


I've known and worked with quite a number of carvers and
cutters (cutters are what the English call banker
masons) who were still healthy and actively carving well
into their 80's and even 90's; these are men who had
used pneumatics for 60+ years. The only granite carver I
knew well who was still carving at the age of 86 had
always used a mask; but the limestone and marble carvers
of that generation never used a mask- as long as they
stuck with white marble or limestone they had no lung
problems. (the heavy smokers did have lung problems, but
that is a different issue). The one consistant health
problem among most of them was with knee and hip joints
on the right leg (left leg in the case of one left
handed stone cutter)... that's an ergonomic issue.

I don't understand why a hand hammer could be considered
a more "human" way of working than a pneumatic hammer.
Especially striking when that statement is typed on a
computer keyboard and sent through the internet to
people all over the world. Is that a less "human" type
of conversation than writing with a pencil?

Walter S. Arnold * walter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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