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In 1959, Bill Smith was an apprentice learning how to build the wooden patterns that foundries use to crank out everything from cast-iron cornbread skillets to the steel wheels on U.S. Army tanks.

Men poured molten metal into sand casts at Waterville Iron Works — which was perched on the banks of the Kennebec River — in the 1800s and early 1900s. They manufactured gears, parts for stoves, plows ...

The foundry industry in the U.S. isn’t what most would consider a growth sector. But Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, or WAF, of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a vertically integrated nonferrous foundry that ...

Mention the term “heavy industry” and the first thing to come to mind might well be the metal foundry. With immense machines and cauldrons of molten metal being shuttled about by crane and rail, the ...

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