Tag: American Manufacturing

America did not forget how to design aircraft, data centers or advanced energy systems. It forgot how to make many of the unglamorous metal parts that allow those systems to work. At Rangeview’s American foundry in El Segundo, California, 26-year-old founder Cameron Schiller is trying to rebuild that missing capability.

Rangeview is not creating another app that promises to “disrupt manufacturing.” It is melting metal. Its workers combine investment casting, 3D-printed ceramic molds, robotics and software to produce precision parts for aerospace, defense, energy and advanced technology customers.

The company’s story is compelling because it begins with something America has spent decades losing: the neighborhood machine shop. Schiller grew up near the former Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Southern California, surrounded by the remains of an industrial culture that once built astonishing things close to home.

A Founder Who Wanted to Build Something Physical

Schiller grew up taking things apart, rebuilding rooms and experimenting with machines. He later won a robotics world championship and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, but the conventional technology path did not hold his attention.

Rangeview began in a garage in 2020. According to a recent profile by Pirate Wires, the company is now operating inside an aging brick industrial building where molten metal, robotic arms and young engineers share the floor.

That combination matters. Much of the American technology economy has rewarded people for building software that captures attention or moves information. Rangeview is attracting young technical talent to a harder assignment: moving metal and delivering physical parts.

Why American Foundries Became a Bottleneck

Investment casting is an ancient process with modern consequences. Manufacturers form a detailed mold, pour in molten metal and finish the resulting component to precise specifications. The process can create complex turbine, aircraft and industrial parts that are difficult to machine from a solid block.

Traditional casting often depends on specialized dies and tooling that take months to design, build and qualify. When an older Navy vessel or aircraft needs a replacement part and the original tooling no longer exists, the delay can keep important equipment out of service.

How Rangeview’s American Foundry Works Differently

Rangeview replaces much of that physical tooling with digital files and 3D-printed ceramic molds. The company says its software-defined process can compress the journey from design to a first finished article from months to weeks.

Inside the foundry, an ingot is heated to roughly 2,000 degrees and poured by robotic equipment into a custom mold. Automation handles dangerous, repetitive steps while engineers and production workers monitor the process, improve reliability and prepare it for higher-volume manufacturing.

This is what advanced manufacturing should mean: not a factory without people, but a factory where people use better tools to produce difficult parts safely, consistently and quickly.

The U.S. Navy Needs Parts That No One Makes Anymore

In August, Rangeview announced a major U.S. Navy contract to produce maintenance, repair and overhaul replacement parts. The work addresses a basic readiness problem: sophisticated equipment can be sidelined by a relatively small component that has become slow or impossible to source.

The challenge is larger than one contract. American casting capacity has declined as infrastructure aged, work moved offshore and experienced foundry workers retired without enough younger workers behind them. Rebuilding the capability means preserving knowledge while redesigning the job for a new generation.

A Factory Can Give a Town More Than Paychecks

Schiller’s ambition extends beyond a single Southern California facility. He has spoken about building factories across the American plains and becoming part of a real factory town—a place where the company and community grow together.

That vision is important because manufacturing provides something difficult to measure on a balance sheet. Workers can point to what they made. Families see the plant supporting suppliers, restaurants, schools and skilled careers. A town gains an identity tied to useful work.

Modern foundries should be cleaner, safer and more technologically capable than the plants of the past. But they can still create the same sense of shared purpose that existed when a community knew exactly what it contributed to the country.

Reindustrialization Requires Actual Factories

America has no shortage of manufacturing conferences, strategy papers and software tools. Schiller’s blunt argument is that none of them substitutes for factories that make parts. Reindustrialization ultimately requires furnaces, equipment, materials, trained people and customers willing to place orders.

Rangeview is still a young company, and scaling a foundry is far more difficult than scaling a website. That is exactly why its effort deserves attention. The country needs founders willing to confront physical constraints instead of treating them as someone else’s problem.

If Rangeview succeeds, its most important product may not be a particular turbine component or Navy replacement part. It may be proof that a new generation of Americans can learn to make difficult things again—and build communities around that work.

Whenever possible, choose Made in USA.

The Canadian boycott of American products has turned three familiar words into a warning label for some shoppers: Made in USA. In grocery aisles across Canada, consumers are checking packages, changing brands and sometimes walking away when the only choice is American.

That should matter to anyone who cares about American manufacturing. The same idea behind the Buy American movement—that ordinary purchases affect real workers—does not stop working when the shopper lives on the other side of the border.

According to recent reporting by The Guardian, a July Angus Reid survey found that 40 percent of Canadian grocery shoppers were actively checking where products came from. Most of those label-checkers were avoiding U.S. products whenever possible.

The Canadian Boycott of American Products Is Personal

This is not simply a government tariff schedule that consumers will never see. Thousands of Canadians have described changing their weekly routines: choosing Canadian-grown food, replacing familiar American brands and reconsidering vacations in the United States.

The emotional intensity is what makes this different from an ordinary trade dispute. People are using purchases to express frustration with the United States, just as many Americans use purchases to express support for domestic workers.

Once a household finds a replacement it likes, that lost sale may not return when the headlines fade. Shopping habits harden quickly. Shelf space, distributor relationships and brand loyalty can take years to win back.

The Label Suddenly Matters

For decades, many companies treated country-of-origin information like fine print. Now it can determine whether a product reaches the checkout counter. Canadian retailers have responded with shelf labels, signs and displays that make locally produced alternatives easier to identify.

That is a lesson worth bringing home. American shoppers routinely say they would prefer to support American workers, but locating genuinely domestic products can be unnecessarily difficult. Clear labeling works because it turns a broad economic belief into a decision someone can make in seconds.

American Workers Feel an Overseas Boycott at Home

Canada is one of the largest customers for American-made goods. When Canadian shoppers stop buying a Wisconsin food product, an Ohio appliance or a Michigan auto part, the economic effect eventually returns to the plant that made it.

The damage is rarely dramatic enough to appear immediately in a factory announcement. It arrives quietly: a Canadian distributor trims an order, a retailer gives more shelf space to a domestic competitor, or a sales forecast no longer justifies adding a second shift. Those decisions eventually reach machinists, packers, truck drivers and suppliers far from the border.

Exports help domestic factories run longer production lines, purchase more material and support more jobs than the U.S. market alone might sustain. Losing even a modest share of Canadian demand can be painful for a smaller manufacturer that spent years building distribution there.

Canada has also announced retaliatory tariffs covering hundreds of American goods, including food, clothing, cosmetics, appliances, paper products and industrial materials. Those duties can make an American product significantly more expensive before a shopper even considers the flag on its package.

Consumer Patriotism Cuts Both Ways

There is an uncomfortable truth here: Americans cannot celebrate consumer patriotism at home and dismiss it as meaningless when Canadians practice it. Both movements rest on the same premise. Where people spend their money influences which communities get the work.

The answer is not to criticize Canadians for checking labels. It is to understand the signal. American manufacturers need competitive products, dependable quality and relationships strong enough to survive political turbulence they did not create.

What American Manufacturers Can Learn

First, origin has become part of a product’s identity. Companies should be precise and transparent about what they make in the United States, where the materials come from and how domestic production supports workers.

Second, manufacturers cannot rely on patriotism alone. A label may earn a first look, but quality, service and value earn the next purchase. The strongest American-made brands give customers practical reasons to remain loyal even when politics changes the mood.

Finally, the boycott demonstrates how quickly millions of small choices become economic pressure. No single shopper closes a production line. But coordinated demand—or coordinated refusal—can alter inventory decisions throughout a supply chain.

A Reminder for American Shoppers

If Canadians can turn country-of-origin checking into a widespread habit, Americans can do the same in support of their own workers. That does not require rejecting every imported product or turning the grocery store into a political battlefield.

It begins with noticing. Read the label, learn which companies still manufacture here and choose the domestic option when it fits your needs and budget. The Canadian boycott is proof that shoppers are not powerless—and that manufacturers pay attention when enough people make the same choice.

The larger lesson is not that neighbors must become enemies. It is that consumer trust is valuable, fragile and difficult to rebuild. American companies that employ American workers deserve trade relationships—and informed customers—that recognize what is at stake.

Whenever possible, choose Made in USA.

For generations in Danville, Virginia, Dan River Mills was more than a factory. It was where parents met, where children expected to work, where paychecks filled local stores and where the rhythm of looms helped set the rhythm of an entire town.

At its wartime peak, Dan River employed about 14,000 people in a city of roughly 40,000. The numbers are remarkable, but they only hint at the mill’s reach. A factory that large did not sit beside the community. It shaped the community.

A Mill Built Beside the Dan River

The story began in 1882, when six local men established Riverside Cotton Mills on the banks of the Dan River. Four mills rose during the company’s first decade, powered by a region eager to turn Southern cotton into finished American cloth.

Riverside merged with the Dan River Power and Manufacturing Company in 1909. By then, annual cloth production had climbed from about 2 million yards in 1884 to more than 78 million yards. Sheetings, ginghams and chambrays carried Danville’s work far beyond Virginia.

When the Factory Became the Community

Like many Southern textile companies, Dan River built housing to attract and retain workers. The mill village of Schoolfield included homes, churches, recreation and the everyday relationships that grow when thousands of families share the same employer.

Company-town life was never simple. Conditions could be harsh, and workers fought difficult battles over wages and control of their jobs. Major strikes in 1930 and 1951 ended in defeat. Still, residents remembered the closeness of a place where work and community were inseparable.

Fourteen Thousand Workers During World War II

Military orders pushed the mills into extraordinary production during World War II. By 1942, Dan River operated twelve weaving and spinning mills along with dyeing, bleaching, finishing and power plants. Nearly half a million spindles fed the largest textile operation in the region.

The mill’s 14,000 workers represented more than one out of every three people living in Danville—not merely one out of every three workers. After the war, civilian demand kept the company growing. Acquisitions lifted companywide employment above 18,000 by 1956.

What a Manufacturing Paycheck Multiplies Into

Every mill job supported more than the person standing at a loom. Wages paid grocers, mechanics, barbers and builders. The company needed suppliers, rail service, maintenance and transportation. Schools and public services depended on an economy anchored by productive work.

That multiplier is easy to overlook when a factory is reduced to an employment number. In a manufacturing town, the plant’s health becomes visible in storefronts, home values, civic groups and children’s expectations about whether they can build a future close to family.

The Long Retreat of American Textiles

Imported textiles began taking market share from American manufacturers in the 1960s. Dan River initially answered with technology and investment, trying to produce more efficiently while keeping its domestic operations competitive.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, imports from Latin America and Asia were arriving in volumes the domestic industry could not withstand. Employment declined, facilities closed and Dan River entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in March 2004.

The Final Jobs Went Overseas

Dan River emerged from bankruptcy, but survival was brief. In 2006, an Indian company purchased the business, closed the main mill and transferred the remaining work overseas. Encyclopedia Virginia records the final move as the loss of hundreds of remaining jobs; historical accounts differ on whether the last transfer involved roughly 500 or as many as 1,100 positions.

The exact final count does not change the outcome. A company that had manufactured American textiles for more than a century no longer made its products in the United States. The brand survived. The production community did not.

Danville Had to Become Something Else

The physical landscape changed too. The familiar smokestacks came down in 2008. Former mill property sat vacant or moved toward new uses while Danville worked to rebuild an economy once dominated by textiles and tobacco.

Today, the former White Mill has become Dan River Falls, a mixed-use redevelopment with residential, office and commercial space. Schoolfield is receiving new investment, and Danville has earned recognition for its comeback. That reinvention deserves respect.

Redevelopment Is Not the Same as Production

A restored building can preserve history and create valuable new activity. It cannot recreate the industrial ecosystem that once trained generations, supported suppliers and shipped tangible goods across the country. A casino, apartment or office may reuse a site, but it does different economic work.

Dan River Mills is not an argument that every old factory should have remained unchanged forever. It is a warning about treating productive capacity as disposable. Once machinery, skills, supplier networks and customer relationships disappear, rebuilding them is far harder than closing a gate.

Remember the People Behind the Label

For consumers, Dan River’s story gives a familiar label a human scale. “Made in USA” was thousands of people in Danville reporting for shifts, learning trades, raising families and spending wages in the place they called home.

We cannot reverse every closure. We can decide that the next factory matters before it becomes a memory. Choosing American-made products, asking retailers where goods are produced and supporting companies that invest here are modest acts—but they help keep today’s manufacturing towns from becoming tomorrow’s historical exhibits.

Whenever possible, choose Made in USA.