As I mod almost all metals to be weapon/armor craftable, this is relevant to my interests.
Almost all. Until Toady One enables radiation NOBODY needs a lead breastplate.
I have a tendency to do this too... but only because finding a set of masterwork golden armor makes for an interesting, if not particularly useful, find to an adventurer.
Platinum war hammers....
This might become my first little modding project.
It is very interesting, and funny to pick up strange metal weapons and armor from goblins. Plus it means I can put honor guards and my internal police in shiny brass or electrum armor. SHINY! Yes, you can make platinum warhammers, and they are pretty effective.
As for the modding project, its pretty easy! Go into your RAW directory and open inorganic_metal.txt and you'll see the entries for each metal. They'll look like this:
[INORGANIC:GOLD]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:METAL_TEMPLATE]
[STATE_NAME:SOLID:gold]
[STATE_NAME:SOLID_POWDER:gold dust]
[STATE_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:gold]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:LIQUID:molten gold]
To make the metal weapon/armor/whatever capable, all you need to do is add any of the following to the metal's entry;
[ITEMS_WEAPON]
[ITEMS_WEAPON_RANGED]
[ITEMS_AMMO]
[ITEMS_DIGGER]
[ITEMS_ARMOR]
[ITEMS_ANVIL]
I think those properties are pretty self explanatory! For example, to make platinum warhammers just find the PLATINUM entry and insert [ITEMS_WEAPON] in there. I'm not sure of you need to regenerate the world - I think not though.