Not a bad foundry/smeltery for early game

[FactorioParadox]

It took me only 3-and-a-half hours to finally get around to building a proper, good-looking foundry/smeltery that performs great (compared to about 50 hours last time), so here it is:

Factorio 0.16.23 2_13_2018 8_27_57 PM.png (2.49 MiB) Viewed 3504 times

Production statistics (ignore everything but the copper plates and ore):

Factorio 0.16.23 2_13_2018 8_27_43 PM.png (1.26 MiB) Viewed 3504 times

And yes, it did crawl to a stop shortly after taking these pics due to the fact that the belts aren't hooked up to anything yet.

[Aeternus]

Neat design - but if you flip the middle row around you can output copper plates on the same belt that services the first row, loading up both sides and eliminating the need for a balancer at the end. Leave some room at the end so you can extend it to 16 smelters per row once you get access to faster belts and you'll have a smelting facility that'll sustain you until you get blue research and the electric smelter. When you switch to electric, eliminating the fuel belt compensates for their bigger size, preventing a complete resize of the smelter.

[FactorioParadox]

Neat design - but if you flip the middle row around you can output copper plates on the same belt that services the first row, loading up both sides and eliminating the need for a balancer at the end. Leave some room at the end so you can extend it to 16 smelters per row once you get access to faster belts and you'll have a smelting facility that'll sustain you until you get blue research and the electric smelter. When you switch to electric, eliminating the fuel belt compensates for their bigger size, preventing a complete resize of the smelter.

Well, each row doesn't have the same amount of miners so eventually one side will run out before the other, necessitating a balancer. I can't add a balancer between the miners and the furnaces - or more furnaces for that matter - as there are cliffs two tiles to the north of my setup.