Making money from Fine Steel ?

[Malathos]

Ok, I've hammerred my way through the ornate chain route and I'm now getting a pretty good skillup rate with fine plate and starting to play around with the lower edges of the dwarven cultural plate...
but the places i'm finding easiest to fight in (lower guk for example) are still dropping quite a bit of fine steel weaponry for me.

Now I no longer need it for smithing skillups, but I was wondering if there's a reasonable way of turning the weapons into reasonable cash ?

I seem to have a few options so far -

1) sell the weapons to merchants - with 110 cha, I can get ok prices

2) sell them in the bazaar - my trademule is fully stocked just now and I don't see much FS shifting on VS these days

3) melt them into ore and sell the ore to merchants / players - the merchant prices for buying ore seem to be worse than the weapons sales prices; but the resellling of HQ ore at below merhant sell prices seems to be a possibility

4) smith the ore into something with a good markup compared to the cost of the other components/mold/patterns

It's this last one that's got me interested

Has anyone had any success in producing items from HQ ore and making a reasonable profit from it - assuming the HQ ore is free - and the profit is more than what you could gain from just selling the weapons ?

[Jaradis Stormcaller]

Well... Fine Steel weapons will get you High Quality Ore, which is used in making Ornate Armors.

Here is what you would need:

At best a fine steel two-handed sword (2 small bricks) and 1 fine steel 1hnd (1 small brick + 0/1/2 small pieces) and 2 flasks of water.
3 small bricks + 1 water = 1 large brick.
1 Flask water + 1 large brick = 2 High Quality Rings.
appropriate chainmail pattern + silver bar + flask water + high quality rings (and smithy hammer) = Ornate gorget, bracers, mask.

So to get an Ornate gorget you need:
1 Fine Steel Two Handed Sword (free)
1 Fine Steel One handed weapon (free)
5 Flasks Water (0.010 pp each)
1 Silver Bar (0.525 pp)
1 Chainmail Pattern (0.525 pp)

Total additional cost of 1.1 pp assuming no failures, and you could have 0 to 2 Small pieces of High Quality ore depending on which 1hnd you used. Fine Steel 2nd sells for ~5.714 pp, and others slightly lower. So your total cost would be around 12 pp (what you could have gotten for selling the FS weapons plus the additional cost you added, and a small increase due to inevitable failures). So Ornate Gorgets would need to sell for more than 12pp to make more money than just selling the

Not sure what Ornate Gorgets sell for to merchants, find that out and there is your answer.

[Meirril]

I think reselling the fine steel bricks/peices would probably net a nice proffit. It would probably sit on your trader for a while, but if anyone has any intrest (i.e. doing Ornate Chain) he'll clean you out.

Also a few halfling tailors need the occasional peice of fine steel. Most can probably cut down their own fine steel weapons but I'd keep that in mind as well.