let us smelt down all metal objects

[Aramara Meibi]

so that we can sell things back to the people we stole it from.

[tman]

Not a bad idea actually.  Each item could be smelted down to a certain percentage of the materials used to create them.

For example, it takes 12 "units" of steel to make a sabre.  We could let players smelt them back down to, say, 9 or 10 "units" of steel to account for bits that are lost during smithing, sharpening, and melting.

This could also be used to solve the sword handle "problem" (I'm sure many don't see it as a problem but I do).  If players lose 10-20% of their sword handle material every time they reheat and re-pound the metal, they'll maybe be less inclined to stand still and pound sword handles for 12 hours at a time.  At the very least it'll force them to actually gather some more material.

[Candy]

I liked the idea at first but more mining? Sounds tedious. Then again smithing's pretty tedious, too. On the other hand, it'd give another option for something to do with the useless named q50 weapons. Perhaps we could have the ability to pry gems out of certain named weapons at some point in the future as well? I know a character or two who would. xD

[LigH]

That will probably require more manpower in the Rules department, to create according item transformations...

[carua]

Well,from experience I know its much harder to salvage steel from something then to use basic stocks to make something so rules wise the devs could add a 30 or so higher skill requirement to salvage it.It also opens up a socketing scheme for weapons to be used with gemcraft.I don't know how the devs would feel about this being quite a lot like other games item customisation systems but I'd imagine a process of:
Find a weapon [say a dagger of laanx mind or something] remove the socket item[BladeSmith]--> you recieve 1 Rune of Laanx mind and 1 Silver dagger[1 socket free] now be cause it's still a useful key word and I am an axe user I got to my gemcrafting/axemaking friend [maybe have a dual skill requirement for setting the weapon] who then sets the rune into my 300q socket reinforced battleaxe and I continue on my merry way.
having found the rare weapon but being able to accomodate it to my characters style but the drop is still more meaningful to me as a player because I did more than just pawn it off to someone else for cash.
It also ties together the crafting skills of gemcraft/blacksmithing/whatever craft your using.
Or for an easire route instead of setting the rune/isignia/glyph/whatever instils the magic we can place it in a necklace instead to give the bonus but taking up 2 slots of equipment[weapon AND necklace needed for the same effect] instead of just the 1 [magic weapon]
Sorry for the block of text

[tman]

That will probably require more manpower in the Rules department, to create according item transformations...

The only extra transformations I can foresee are:
Weapon -> X molten steel
(where X is, say, the number of molten steel originally used in the weapon minus 10-20%)

[Minks]

Doesn't work that way. 
You'll have to type "Weapon -> X molten steel" plus tons of extra parameters into a ridiculusly complicated excel file. A separate transformation for every single weapon you want to transform. And then somebody has to put it all into the data base. And of course, check everything for consistency and possible exploits, like infinite quality/pp/money gain. 

But I like the idea!