The problem with having lots of single bolts around is, I find, it messes up the marksdwarves- they always grab the single bolt piles for me, thus their training ios pretty useless.
Oh well, if its the only way to get steel back I guess i'll have to risk it and turn on more than one smelter for melting.
Thanks
Just use your z-stocks menu like we said and your dwarves will get the job done sooner or later.
And the idea of using multiple smelters, when you melt an item, 1/10th of the size is returned in metal. When you get a full bar, it gives you the bar but not before. If you have multiple smelters running, you're likely to end in a situation where one smelter has 5/10ths of a steel bar, one has 7/10ths, and one has 8/10ths of a bar. If you did those at one smelter you'd have two bars already whereas with three you don't have any yet. Just to forewarn.
Wiki article on Melting
Yes, but if you use only a single smelter odds are you will never get the job done. You have to balance it out, material efficiency vs time efficiency.
I usually stick with 4 magma smelters that I do all of my melting on. I never deconstruct these guys once they're built, and they do no other tasks besides melting things down.
Also, if you want to automate the process a bit, create two stockpiles. One is a weapon/armor stockpile for usable items. The other is a weapon/armor stockpile for unusable items. These are things that you dwarves cannot equip. Then you can simply mass designate the entire thing for melting every once in a while. Note that trap components will also be sent here, but if you're using glass or wood trap components you don't have to worry about this, as only metal items can be designated for melting.
The real issue, I think, was with the bolts, since you don't want a marksdwarf picking up a single bolt, firing it, then rushing in to bash the enemies. There's no real way to handle this, unfortunately, just mark them for melting and hope it goes away.
As for melting down large and small armor though, Hyn is spot on. The only thing that needs correcting is that you can change a stockpile's settings so it doesn't receive trap weapons anymore, so even if you use serrated steel disks you won't have to worry about melting them, since they won't be in that stockpile.