Just to point out that scrolls to advance any skill beyond 100 are extremely expensive.  No beginning player is going to have access to such cash nor to the fancy equipment used to make the fancy equipment players want.   So basically the blacksmith is now a secondary character, you need another type of character to make money for them so they can afford the fancy scrolls and equipment to make him self supporting.

If i can remember correctly (been a really long time), if u want to use the LEAST AMOUNT of ingots to train from 40-60 just make wooden kite shields... they only cost 8 ingots compared to basinets going for 10-12 ingots each...

Might be interesting to note that Every 20 points of Armslore give you +1 point of expert armor, so it is not only used for disarming .....

No bonus for Weaponcrafting.

But gm smithing should not take longer than a day or two if you have enough ingots and is not rewarding and pretty useless as best items are loot from monsters.

Some might argue that best items come from runic tools, but then it is just plaiyng the lottery. You MIGHT get something useful out of a tool which costs a LOT of gold.