​”You Have to Become the App”: Why Traditional Hand Tools Beat Modern Technology

by John Wirth, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter 

​(ANNews) – In an era dominated by computerized woodworking tools, Métis carver Patrick Calihou applies a simple ancestral compass to his work. Whenever a complex project runs aground, he never looks for a modern shortcut. Instead, he asks: “What would great-grandpa and grandma do? Especially because without her, he wouldn’t have eaten that day.” 

Patrick notes how women in history have struggled to have their stories heard alongside the men and it’s important to sing their praise as well. 

​Inside his Fraser Valley lower-floor woodshop, packed with custom hand tools and half-born projects, Calihou reflects on the self-reliance of his ancestors compared to modern dependency.

​”Our ancestors were so rugged compared to us. We’ve become mush in that way, right? We’re so dependent for a lot of our survival skills,” Calihou notes. “You have to become ‘the app’, you know?”

​For Calihou, modern power tools are over-engineered, fragile, and often drain creative energy through endless settings and troubleshooting. Experienced craftspeople can spend more time tweaking adjustments than actually shaping material. Traditional hand tools, by contrast, offer a slower, more deliberate workflow where subtle adjustments are made by touch and feel rather than a computer chip.

​”I had the electric tools today, but I hate them. The hand tools, they just work,” says Calihou. “The hand-planer has all these bells and adjustments from a computer, and they just fall apart. I started making our own tools out of pieces of metal… Just rediscovering the old ways.”

​By forging his own tools from scrap metal, Calihou unlocks a vital bridge to his heritage. Because the fundamental challenges of joinery, tension, and material limits never change, crafting tools by hand taps directly into the same inventive, resourceful mindset that sustained past generations.

​That philosophy extends to the personal details on his finished pieces, from wood burning to subtle maker’s marks.

​”We really stress about those little details, because that’s what your family would have done. You wouldn’t be slapping them out, It mattered.” Calihou explains. 

For Patrick, the surface value of a hand tool is that it is simpler and less likely to break. But the deeper truth is that the tool demands something from the person using it. It requires patience, attention, and a willingness to solve problems without technology providing an answer.

Making his own tools is another form of carving. He is shaping metal, wood, and inherited knowledge into something useful. something marked by his own hands and connected to the hands that came before him.

“You have to become the app,” Calihou says. The phrase is more than a criticism of modern convenience. It is a philosophy of self-reliance: learn the material, understand the process, and carry the necessary knowledge within you. In Calihou’s shop, every tool bears that lesson. The fewer things that stand between the maker and the work, the more fully the maker becomes part of it.