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[SilasG]

Hey guys, my embark area has access to a good supply of hematite hence iron but not too much flux that I have found so my steel production is rather limited. I wanted to train my armorsmiths skill up before making any steel armor so it would be high quality. After perusing the wiki it looks like I should forge either gauntlets or high boots and then melt, repeat and I'll get a net gain of materials? Is this still correct? I was going to set up a repeating order to make say iron gauntlets or high boots then melt and just cycle that until ..er they are legendary? I'm not sure what a "good" skill level is for this.

[MobRules]

Make sure to filter by quality before melting -- if you melt masterworks, you'll have unhappy armorers.

[Niddhoger]

Smelters actually store fractional bars. If you melt shields, you have to smelt 5 from the SAME smelter to gain a full extra bar. They return for 1.2. If just one of those goes to a different smelter, your extra bar gets put on hold.

This is obviously a serious exploit. You might as well use DFHack to spawn volumes of steel to use.

Personally, I pair up items to get a net zero effect when training on a budget. Every shield that yields .2 extra is checked by a mail shirt that loses .2 of a bar. Metal is infinitely recyclable. This should already be the case... No losing volume in the smelter... Let alone gaining it.

[Henry47]

I used to mass melt and reforge weapons and armour in my first fort, but it felt a bit cheaty and in my later forts i made sure to embark on a map with loads of iron and flux instead. At any rate its more interesting than exploiting bugs.

[Arcvasti]

What I'd do, personally, would be to find a piece of armour with a slight negative yield[0.9ish, let's say] and forge, melt and reforge THAT until desired skill is obtained. This way, I'd say it wouldn't be an exploit since you're not actually making metal out of nowhere. If there's any copper on your map, I would use that instead. And I find that you get immigrants with mid-high metalsmithing skills decently often.

[SilasG]

Thanks for the replies! I wasn't really doing this to produce extra as I have loads of hematite. I just wanted to not be wasteful and train my dwarf up. My steel is limited by the meager flux but surely that can't be the only pocket of marble. I was thinking at first to make then melt/reforge steel things but, as another poster says, a lesser and more abundant metal will work as well.

[Kneenibble]

Unless you've embarked deliberately on a site with very few metals, then most maps have some form of copper somewhere between the sky and the magma sea.  You can use that to train your armourer and save the iron and steel until he is highly skilled.

Alternatively, you can activate armour-smithing on every dwarf and leave a repeating order on at the forge.  Nearly everybody will get to dabbling or novice and then there's a good chance that one of them will simply get a strange mood hankering to hammer out a codpiece, and bam!  Legendary.

[cochramd]

If you start getting masterworks before your armorsmiths are legendary, one thing you might want to consider is stopping production of common-metal armor and start producing steel shields (if you're going to use them), steel high boots and steel gauntlets until you've got all the masterworks you need. This won't be for getting the melting returns so much as getting all your masterwork armor just a little bit sooner. Note that I listed the items in increasing order of how many you'll need to make to get the required number of masterworks (shields are obviously the easiest because you don't need matching pairs, and high boots are easier than gauntlets because they don't have right and left versions), so if you want to minimize the steel gained from melting make only one item type at a time and in the order listed.

Alternatively, you can activate armour-smithing on every dwarf and leave a repeating order on at the forge.  Nearly everybody will get to dabbling or novice and then there's a good chance that one of them will simply get a strange mood hankering to hammer out a codpiece, and bam!  Legendary.

In practice I've found that one dwarf will hog a workshop for multiple jobs, so you'd need a lot of forges to make this work.

[timotheos]

What I'd do, personally, would be to find a piece of armour with a slight negative yield[0.9ish, let's say] and forge, melt and reforge THAT until desired skill is obtained. This way, I'd say it wouldn't be an exploit since you're not actually making metal out of nowhere. If there's any copper on your map, I would use that instead. And I find that you get immigrants with mid-high metalsmithing skills decently often.

I go with a more immediately useful method of setting my armour smith to make the full armour set on repeat. Then melt any low quality items once I have a surplus. You may get lucky with the rng and be able to equip a small elite squad in masterwork stuff quite early. I'm also fine with my soldiers only having exceptional armour in the medium term.
I find smelters level up faster than smiths and I have to start adding in any goblinite and/or stuff bought from the caravan to stop them running out of rubbish armour to melt. A combination of ordering flux stone and steal anvils means i will do this even with steal on a no iron embark.

[Sanctume]

The dfhack automelt stockpile is nice a quality of life. 
If you have plenty of hematite source, then the melting of certain armor pieces that gains more bars that its initial cost is not too exploity to worry about (for me).

I would just make 2 stockpile: masterwork+artifact quality, and low quality automelt enabled. 

I make 4+ or more forges too in their own 3x4 rooms with specific bars stockpile: steel, platinum, gold/silver.  When a mood happens, I usse DT to see the preference and hope it like platinum and war hammer which I then forbid other piles except the one with the plat bar stockpile near it.

If you have other abundant metals such as copper / bronze, I'd practice on those first.  Then I would train a weaponsmith melting those and making bolts.