If you use any search engine to find news or information about foundries, be prepared to sift through a lot of silicon. Online, there's not an overwhelming amount of information about metalcasters and their operations — it's one of our hopes, with the recent redesign of this site, to improve that situation — but there is an apparently endless series of pages and pixels about computers and microelectronics.

In the microelectronics industry, a "foundry" is a factory where integrated circuits are manufactured. Apparently, this appropriation is an homage to the foundries we know, presumably also a stake on the many virtues associated with the work of real foundries: solidity, integrity, permanence, and the like.

But, most of this is unstated and undocumented. If the operators of the chip foundries know anything about real foundries, they don't show it. And, as the search engines prove, most of the world thinks those chip foundries are the only foundries out there.

Let me be more constructive: if the chipmakers want this label so badly, why should metalcasters cling to it? They do so much more than what is implied by the term "foundry." I arrived at this point from another angle earlier this week, in with an executive of the Invesment Casting Institute, and he acknowledged his colleagues frustration with lack of a clearer identify. Their's are not "foundry" operations by any standard or even alternative definition, but they are almost certainly the cutting edge of metalcasting in our time.  They work closely with product designers to convert ideas into possibilities. They develop the molds and tooling that make these designs real. They model the production process and test the materials. They produce the parts and deliver them, successfully, as promised, frequently on short delivery schedules.

They do all of these things, and they do them well. Very well. So why is it so hard for us to put a name on them?

Your thoughts on this — as on any topic on this site — are welcome.