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by ABeeSea 1890 days ago
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

1 comments

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).