ok so what you need to do is first make the wooden cast first, then make a , say, pickaxe head using the wooden cast and the part builder or whatever its called. then you need to place that in a casting table. then you poor either aluminium brass or gold into the casting table using your smeltery and then, vola, you have yourself a cast for your part that you can use to make metal/alloy parts. basically you needed to make the lower teir versions of the item you want to make a cast for. also in order to craft a lumber axe or any of the special things that mine multiple blocks you need a tool forge, which is made buy combining a tool station, 3 seered bricks and 4 blocks of any metal from iron to gold to aluminium brass. in order to get the blocks of metal you need a smeltery to melt the metal into a liquid and use a crucible to make it into a block. that is now the only way to make blocks of metal. you cant craft them. though what you can do i think is use blocks of lapis. i'll have to check. also you can find the recepies in NEI.