Should work on 1.6.4 modpacks with Thermal Expansion 3
Produced on the Minecraftia at Arms modpack 2.1.1
I'm using Thermal Expansion 4.
I recommend you use Not Enough Items to use for recipes if it's in your modpack
  If you want to have an edge in PvP, resource gathering, and pretty much everything, it is essential you know how to squeeze everything out of your ores.
Almost all tech modpacks have Thermal Expansion 3 (1.6.4) or Thermal Expansion 4 (1.7.10). Thermal Expansion is easy with your resources and easy to learn! Not only that, but it's one of the most popular mods out there as well!

So..
Let's get started!

The first thing you'll be needing is a dynamo.
A dynamo produces Redstone Flux.

"But legoeeyore, what's Redstone Flux?"

Redstone Flux (known as RF) is basically energy. You'll be needing it for your machines.

The first thing you'll want to craft is a Steam Dynamo.

A Steam Dynamo produces RF from steam, which is made from water and fuel - which is usually coal and charcoal.

Right-click the dynamo with a bucket of water to put water inside the dynamo, and put fuel in the dynamo as you would put fuel into a furnace. When it is making RF, it should light up.

Every dynamo makes 80 RF/t, which you shouldn't really care about since it will power everything here decently, but if you really want to know, it means it makes 80 RF each tick. There are 20 ticks in a second, so it will make 1600 RF each second, which is more than enough for now.

Now, you'll want to craft a pulverizer. A pulverizer is the main machine - and the first you'll be crafting. It pulverizes items and blocks into other items and blocks, such as cobble to sand and one iron ore to two pulverized iron (same for gold, diamonds, etc). Each pulverized iron can be smelted into ingots, which rocks! You just got two ingots from one ore!

The UI looks like this:




Oh my! It looks terribly complicated! How does this work?

Here's what the numbers mean:

1. This is the internal RF storage. It will store RF here if it is not using any.

2. This is the input. This is where you put in ores, items and blocks to be pulverized.

3. This is the primary output. This is where the pulverized items come out.

4. This is the secondary output. Sometimes you might get a bonus item from pulverizing, such as pulverized ferrous from iron ore as shown, or pulverized gold from copper ore. It comes out here.

5. This is where you can configure what the faces of the pulverizer do. It's basically sending our primary output to the Redstone Furnace (more on that later), and our secondary output as well once the Redstone Furnace is done smelting the primary output. You should set it to this configuration.

Whoops! How do we send the RF from the dynamo to the pulverizer? The pulverizer won't work without RF!

You have 3 options:

1. You can craft some conduits from Thermal Dynamics (leadstone ones are the cheapest) to transport the power.

2. You can use universal cables from Mekanism, as shown. (I'm using basic universal cables)
.
4. Place the dynamo next to the pulverizer, or the pulverizer on top of the dynamo.




You can stop here if you don't need/want automatic smelting.


Next up is the Redstone Furnace! This baby will use RF to automatically smelt items for you. Just place it next to the pulverizer, slap a cable/conduit/transfer node on top of it and watch it smelt! Our pulverizer configuration (if you're using it) will automagically send the pulverized stuff to the furnace, so there's no need to worry about that.



1. This is the internal RF storage. It will store RF here if it is not using any.

2. This is the input. This is where you can put in ores, items and blocks to be smelted, but the pulverizer configuration will do that for us.

3. This is the output. This is where the smelted ingots come out.

4. This is the configuration. This one is accepting the pulverized ores in the furnace (blue face), and then shipping out the smelted ingots to a chest next to it (orange chest)

And that's all there is to it! You can now double your ores!


Got a suggestion? Do you need the crafting recipes? Was this too complicated? Comment below!