Heat.

It whooshed past me as big buckets of bubbling bronze moved through the air, tethered to a crane, with one large, silver-clothed man guiding them from one place to the next.

I wasn’t supposed to be exactly there. I should have been a foot back. The blast of heat caught me off guard, landing like a lurch in my stomach.

I stepped back, coming eye-to-wide-eye with a Penn State materials science instructor. He flailed his arms.

“You’re all everywhere!” he shouted.

We were. Me, holding my iPhone tightly and pleased with the last shot. Zach Glabman stood about two yards away with his film crew while Ken Spaulding of Volund Manufacturing captured beautiful stills with a high-end camera.

The Keystone Foundry men—the ones who actually did the work and didn’t just talk about it, like me—were foreboding. Literal giants of men: Andy, Stefan and Mike. Well over six feet and brooding. Happy, but brooding. They smirked at us as we took turns pouring little ladles of liquid metal into prepared molds that would become medallions. It was our reward for dipping our toes into the field of metallurgy.

We were visitors in their world, outsiders inside the Misty Mountains. Andy, Stefan and Mike didn’t know the mystique we felt as we cosplayed metalworkers. Well—some of us cosplayed. Most of this was boots-on-the-ground. Some of us had our heads in the clouds, dreaming and imagining ways to reindustrialize the country by changing hearts and minds.

I’m the latter. I have the privilege of being the hype-girl of metallurgy without the skill to actually do it. Until now, at least.

National Security Is At Stake

I moved away from certain death and toward Andy—not the Andy melting metal, a different one. This Andy had on an ACE hat that was very well worn, despite the fact that I knew it couldn’t be that old. Andy didn’t know this, but ACE is a sister program to the one I was there representing and was formed only five years ago. The goal there was to train people to become machinists. I was there for METAL, a program designed to train people to become metalworkers.

Why? Because the Department of War needs things built with metal, and there aren’t enough people who want to do it. Not only that, but the capability in general isn’t there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Andy, yelling over the din of sirens and jittering equipment, immediately jumped to the heart of the problem.

“We’re starting to get a lot more work here because industry is finally coming back,” he bellowed. “This kind of work got moved overseas years ago.”

Keystone Foundry in Erie, Pennsylvania, has been in continuous operations since 1887 and is one of the oldest businesses in the city. Thanks in part to defense contracts, business is booming.

“The national security of our country is at stake here. I’m glad that our government recognizes it and is investing in this industry because it’s critical to our survival as a nation,” said Operations Manager Adam Scheloske as he gave us the safety talk before we went in to where the magic happens.

To get some background on Keystone Foundry, I had taken to Google before heading out there and clicked on “news.” All I found were obituaries of people who had worked there faithfully for decades.

Reindustrialize isn’t a word Apple recognizes. Resurrection is.

Quick context: I work for a manufacturing institute (IACMI) that leads workforce development programs in casting, forging and machining. We’re funded by the Department of War’s IBAS program to address workforce shortages in those industries.

I am not an engineer or metalworker by any stretch of the imagination and never have been, but I am acutely aware of the devastation wreaked on towns when our country began to offshore this type of work in the 1980s.

For this particular trip, I invited some friends in the reindustrialize space on X to attend a METAL bootcamp at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania. These folks are what I consider micro-influencers; they write, and people respond. I did not expect nearly everyone I invited to say yes, but they did.

Echoes of the Past

The term reindustrialization actually isn’t new, despite its prominence in the manufacturing world right now thanks to people like Aaron Slodov of Atomic Industries and Ben Kohlmann—now the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, but previously CEO of the New American Industrial Alliance, the organization behind the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit. The word itself was coined by sociologist Amitai Etzioni during the manufacturing crises of the 1970s, when policymakers first began asking how the United States might rebuild the industrial capacity it had dismantled.

Kind of scary, right? We’ve been here before, just with a different cast of characters. The warnings were there the first time, too. We didn’t heed the voices crying in the wilderness.

There’s a movie called Wanderlust where a character always lists the names of the co-founders of his cult whenever he starts monologuing, and there’s a chance I’m about to do that, too. Because I think you’ll hear these names again in the future. Heed them.

Ken Spaulding, Russell Winter, Zach Glabman, Lana Smith, Jason Dicosimos, Eric Trulson, Jack Watson, Amanda Freuler Seals and Daniel Mitchell were all at this METAL bootcamp. Some are multi-generational factory owners, some are founders, some work purely in defense and some are hobbyists. Eric said I’m a good hype-girl, and I’m satisfied with that.

One conversation I had with my team at IACMI when I first came on board two years ago involved changing the narrative around these jobs being “dark, dirty and dangerous” to appeal more to Gen Z.

But… they kind of are.

And that’s not a bad thing.

Something Worth Doing

I was at Ellwood EQS, a steel melting facility, a few weeks ago and met one of their new hires. He was part of the teeming crew, which involves climbing up on molds as tall as 25 feet high to prepare them for the metal pour. These would go on to become large steel ingots. In fact, Ellwood is a leading supplier of steel ingots in North America.

Logan had worked there for four weeks when I met him. Before that, he had spent six years working for a logistics company—from home.

“It nearly killed me,” he told me later. “It wasn’t good for me to be home all the time. I came here because I wanted to do something worth doing, in the real world.”

“And you like it?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said with a smile, his face covered in black sand. “Oh, yeah. I don’t know if this specific position is what I’ll stick with, but this is where I want to be.”

The teeming position can be hard to keep filled, in part because humans tend to have a fear of heights. We were there to shoot GoPro and virtual reality footage that EQS could use at career fairs to give people an idea of what the job actually entails. I know there are some adrenaline junkies out there who would love it.

I don’t know if Logan knows this, but it can take five to ten years for people to reach the top of their craft in this world, according to Jack Watson. Jack is the fourth-generation owner of HFW Industries in Buffalo, New York, and is singularly focused not only on growing his own company, but on elevating manufacturing careers.

It’s that level of worker that’s hard to find—the one who already knows how to do what needs to be done. Nearly a quarter of the manufacturing workforce is over 55, and retirements are accelerating. With that goes the tribal knowledge. Our program introduces people to these careers, so there will be a healthy middle within a few years, but you can’t just inject knowledge into people.

Unless Elon comes up with a brain chip for that.

Russell Winter sees the same problem from a different angle. His grandfather started Center Tool in the 1970s making trim dies—the massive tools used to cut excess metal off die-cast parts. By the time Russell bought the company from his father in 2019, the shop had become more of a general precision machining operation, cutting aluminum, steel and plastic parts.

Around that time he started talking with other small manufacturers and noticed something troubling: many of them were nearing retirement, and their kids weren’t taking over the businesses the way previous generations had.

“What happens to all these companies,” he wondered, “when the owners retire and no one takes them over?”

That question eventually led him to start US MFG, a platform designed to help small manufacturers connect with one another—sharing work, balancing workloads, and helping smaller shops qualify for defense contracts. Small manufacturers, he explained, often swing between being overwhelmed with orders and sitting idle. Connecting them could smooth that out.

“If they just had more work,” he said, “they’d do great at making parts.”

These Guys Are Trailblazers

Now, you have to remember that in 2019, nobody was talking about reshoring or reindustrializing. Russell was. Homeschooled and raised on a farm, he began to question himself after the COVID years. He wasn’t getting much traction. He knew the country needed to bring back skilled jobs, but he questioned his vision. Was he too idealistic? Was it too late for America to become a country that makes things again?

Little did he know that across the country, small pockets of forward-thinking people were synchronistically dreaming about the same thing. Did you know that if you set off a hundred metronomes at different times, eventually they’ll all sync up?

Apparently it happens with people, too.

Standing there in Keystone Foundry, it was hard to believe there wasn’t work. The place felt alive.

Behind us, Nicole was busy making cores – another job that’s becoming more and more rare in the U.S. Around the corner Andy – the first Andy – was back at the blazing furnace grabbing red hot ingots with tongs and placing them on a rack. All this, despite the foundry being closed for the afternoon to make time for our visit.

At EQS, the 20-ton vacuum induction melting furnace would go off every 40 minutes, giving everybody a light and sound show that could convince a person a universe was being born. Cranes overhead, sirens going off, steam hissing over the surface of the metal, all part of a living and breathing ecosystem that makes the parts that build our world.

Reindustrialize might not be a word Apple recognizes.

But standing in a foundry while the metal flows, resurrection doesn’t seem like such a strange idea.

To start training online for free, visit www.metalforamerica.org or americascuttingedge.org.