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[Psieye]

"Weapon traps being jammed" translates to a corpse being inserted into the trap's 'building inventory'. This happens when a trap makes a direct killing blow - tearing apart the brain. Every other cause of death (usually bleeding) gives the victim time to crawl away before expiring. Therefore, many traps with few discs are likely to kill through profuse bleeding whereas few traps with 10x discs are likely to get jammed fast.

Whatever you want, as you can later smelt it into bars again to recover some of your investment and avoid waste.

Otherwise, if you're into traps, serrated iron disks would be your best option. You can train your weaponsmiths while producing useful things to rip the guts of stuff.

so long as you're careful what you melt backdown.
melt anything masterwork and the smith will get a bad thought.
do 20-30 in a row and he goes utterly batshit.

It depends how many masterworks he's made in his life. If it's his only masterwork you melt down, it's one of the worst bad thoughts possible. If he's made thousands, he can shrug off 30-ish going down. But yes, never melt down or atom smash masterworks - sell them if you want to get rid of them. Therefore design custom stockpiles to separate the masterworks from the expendable.

[wuphonsreach]

Downside of making early discs is that it will drive your fortress wealth up fairly quickly.  Copper/glass discs are worth a lot less then iron/silver discs.  Which is why I mostly rely on wood weapons in weapon traps for the first two years, along with using simple dodge-this setups that prevent entry into the fort.

Very few of my weapon traps ever have more then 1 weapon in them.  Unless it's the center of the dodge-this maze, where I will attempt to kill anything that is trying to go back up top to escape.

[Oliolli]

Or you can use cage traps. Much more sure and you get prisoners

Of course, you need to reload them, and you need to constantly build cages.

[Naryar]

I personally use copper and silver to build up smithing XP. But iron is fine if you have a lot of it.

[Maklak]

This wiki article is very informative: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Melting

Looking at it, with too much iron I'd personally make enormous corkscrews. Good quality ones can be used for weapon traps, and other melted or used for pumps. They are magma-safe too!.

[Satarus]

If you are training with iron, leggings for armorsmiths, trap components for weaponsmiths, and goblets for metal crafters.  Metalsmiths are nice because you can just make lots of barrels.  You can never have too many barrels.

[Girlinhat]

I do statues.  The good ones (dwarves killing elves, dwarves on fires, badgers killing goblins) get put up on display.  Masterworks get sold.  The sub-par statues depicting an ettin settling in the Plain of Wafting in Year 1, those get melted back into a bar and made into another statue.

[metime00]

(spamlink)

Holy shit guys! We can trade away our masterwork iron goods for REAL CASH!!!!1

Just use the iron to make iron blocks for an iron tower or something. Quality doesn't matter, and, to my knowledge, they train just as fast as with other items. There is no metal building material more rustic than iron.

[Girlinhat]

I'm not usually swimming in iron, but when I have some to spare I'll frame my buildings.  Like make the walls of stone and the cornerstones out of iron.  Or I'm more likely to make yard decorations, like short pyramids, upright columns, or those "tank trap" things like you see in WWII movies.

[Hyndis]

I turn iron into steel as quickly as possible. I then decorate the steel with other metals goblins bring, or make furniture out of iron if I don't need any more steel.

As far as weapons go, I find 2-3 discs per weapon trap is good. Each trap hits like a truck, but you can have a very large number of traps for increased carnage and reduced threat of traps being jammed.