I had been making steel armor for a while before I realized the folly in not having at least someone competent doing it... so after a while my Dungeon Master became competent at armorsmithing, and set him off to make some steel caps and such.
Micromanaging my army to change armors is another story... but anyway
So he makes the caps and some are fine, which would make great replacements for all the regular iron caps everyone is wearing. No one takes them out of the shop, and all new recruits end up finding old iron caps that I swear I marked as melt but it never happened...
I then decided to task the DM with stud an object with silver, and he takes a fine cap and studs it with silver--the cap is now worth $1200. Then he studs the same item with gold, and it's worth $2200 (fire bellied toads and hippos striking down dwarves, if you must ask what was the decoration)
I realized this is a great way to make lightweight high value trade items. Typically they'd enhance something like narrow chainmail, so great, but you can't trade a boatload of heavy items to the dwarven caravan that you can with the humans, and the dwarves are who bring you steel armor when you need it most!
And I did it again, I accidentally sent a legendary swordsdwarf to crossbow and he picked up that damned artifact crossbow that none of my actual designated crossbow dwarves ever grab (instead, they opt for Manta Ray Bone Crossbows, heh). And he won't let go of it.. so its back to square one with him.