[hinkley]

Foundries were a thing, but even those are giving way to factories, right?

I mean, someone will always make stock, but fewer companies melt metal these days, or at the very least relative to those that carve it up or weld it together (which may or may not involve a little melting, given spin welding and other techniques).

[ABeeSea]

Foundries and forges are different things.

A forge is closer to what you would call a manufacturing factory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging

A foundry smelts. But it is also technically a factory for input material. In the same way a sawmill is a factory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry

[InitialLastName]

Yeah, "factory" is really the general term for a facility that adds value to inputs at an industrialized scale. A lay person would call everything from a smelting plant to an electronics assembly floor a "factory" and not be wrong.

From a pre-industrial blacksmith's perspective, the bigger distinction might be between a "factory" and a "shop". The processes involved are effectively the same; the difference is the scale/flexibility tradeoff (a shop can make different things every day without added overhead, where a "factory" gains enormous efficiency by being configured to do a single process).