My father ran a control valve plant. He used to cart his children out to the factory on weekends. Dad would work in his office, and my brothers and I would roam around the machine shop and assembly area out back.

I didn't think much about it. I collected bright plastic caps, which I now know to be the protectors of threaded holes and pipe ends. And I unintentionally memorized the smell. I believed my older brother when he told me that our Dad made vowels.

Dad was a manufacturer, from a distant time when we used to make things. He climbed through the ranks of a paternalistic family corporation that became a global enterprise. And he did it well. He served the company loyally, for 28 years.

As Dad was shipping valves to the pulp and paper industry, and the petroleum industry the message to his four boys was simple: "Be a company man," he said.

When it became apparent that the valve company could not successfully pass from father unto son, Monsanto bought it, and Dad found himself with new masters.

They needed to demonstrate quick profits, and guys like my Dad, who worked for the long-term health of the company, were in the way. His "cradle to grave" world of service was transformed into acquisitions and fast money and outsourcing, and at age 54 he found himself out of the workforce.

You could say he retired, since he never went back to work. Or you could say that someone he had never met, in a faraway place, drew a line through his name.

Dad left with two pensions, back when corporate America still offered such a thing.

None of which mattered to me. I went off to study poetry and couldn't have cared less about the world of industry. What I did notice was how the message had changed. Without a shred of bitterness, Dad suggested to his sons that they should no longer be "company men," but rather, "should work for themselves."

We heeded his advice. I ended up at Piedmont Biofuels, where the smell of manufacturing came back to me. On one of Dad's visits he explained the smell was cutting oil - a lubricant used on drill bits to keep them from getting dull when going through steel.

At one point on our quest for sustainable biodiesel we bought an abandoned industrial park. Its buildings were filled with expensive electrical breakers and giant hydraulic presses and machinery that had sat idle for a decade.

I once envisioned the fortune we would make by selling off all that great stuff. We had $800 switches and thousand dollar transformers everywhere.

After liberating some valuable equipment I was stunned to learn that no one was buying old industrial stuff. At least not in America.

It turned out there were warehouses full of $800 switches, which weren't worth $800 any more. They were worth half that. In China. The only place where customers were buying.

Rather than launch a new career as a seller of abandoned industrial parts, I stayed focused on making biodiesel.

Along the way Piedmont became accomplished at building small-scale biodiesel plants for others. We found ourselves fishing vessels and equipment out of the waste stream and re-purposing them for biodiesel.

In building our own plant, we became a manufacturer, or perhaps a "re-manufacturer" would be a better term.

By the summer of 2009 the biodiesel industry was on the ropes. Feedstocks were too expensive to be used for fuel.

One of our welders, Rick, said, "Hell, we should just make things."

And that seemed like a good idea.

Nowadays we don't just make biodiesel. We also make worm bins for vermiculture systems, and we make rain water delivery systems out of scrap, and we make containers for square foot gardeners, and we make boiler fuel out of free fatty acids, and we build custom boiler systems, and we make seed crushing systems that extract oil, which means we also make animal feed.

There was a time when the only thing that shipped from the plant was biodiesel. These days there is no telling what is on the truck.

But it feels good to be making things again. It even smells good.