Get cutthroat merchants, and the weapon meltdown mod.

With Cuttthroat merchants youlll have a lot less money to blow on materials.

Now in order to have the materials for smithing you need to actually go out and mine it.

I don't have PC for mods, but you can easily make money for smithing by enchanting the iron daggers you make and selling back for way more than you paid for the cost of materials.

Or, if you want to look at it from a different perspective, you can easily have too much junk to carry around by enchanting the iron daggers you make with Banish and have to gallivant across the Skyrim country side to find enough merchants onto which you can unload your stash of enchanted iron daggers.

Worst... part... ever... this and unloading all of the potions you need to grind Alchemy, though the easiest fix there is to find a trainer for alchemy who also buys/sells potions - save some levels up while grinding it - then buy more skill points and the vendor will have the cash from your purchase of training with which to buy your potions.

daedric also needs to be removed from the list of armors you can smith.

Well then the drop rate would need to be increased in the post L40 world... or perhaps they drop specifically from... Daedra?

--Randall

Well if you have enchanted iron daggers, you don't really need much more in your inventory, they can buy you whatever you need to make decent weapons and armor and are much more cost/weight effecient than anything you'll pick up off enemies.

the best way is to have two full suits seperated and scattered around the game world in random locations for each game. or possibly have some quest from a daedra that could give you a suit. its supposed to made powerful magic by mages.......not smiths. and most importantly it needs to be super rare.

i would agree with the daedra except that you could end up with up to four suits very early in the game if you do a certain quest which is easily done even at early levels.

Much like with any sandbox RPG. If you're metagaming (i.e. having played through and knowing where the drops are, or reading a wiki site), you can always go find the stuff you want roughly when you want it. That's life, and a personal gaming choice. I enjoy the metagaming on the 3rd playthrough

An easier way, especially for those who're on consoles, is to just level Smithing off materials you find. The simple/trivial act of not buying ingots from the vendors makes Smithing level at a much more reasonable pace.

I store equipment in the barrels at the Ironmaiden (I think) . Smithing equipment in one barrel and the stuff I plan to work on in the right one. After each mission, I stored stuff in the barrel and fast travel back until I get done. I would take trips loading down my follower (only items over 100gp) and we were off again. Then I would turn skins to leather, smelt what I have found to ingots...then I grab all items in both barrels - put on smithing equipment I have bought (gauntlets, amulet, ring) - drink a Smith potion - and go to work upgrading as fast as I can - first weapons rotate to the left and then use the table to upgrade armor. After I was done, I would put ingots, leather, and smithing equipment back in the left barrel and head out to sell what I now had - first at the blacksmith, the archer, my house, the merchant, then Arcadia - then head over to the Sky forge - then head back - put the rest in the RIGHT barrel and off to explore again.

I went up on the left side tree of smithing just to get glass and Dragon. Once I got dragon, I pretty much only make Dragon armor - that I upgrade and sell now.
I never enchanted any items, never "spun" creating any items - just upgraded things I found - then sold those.

You can push sales higher by buying stuff from them first - then turning around and selling bigger ticket items.

Seems to work well for me on the XBOX 360 - as Im level 45 and have 200+K gold
Im not metagaming or churning any smithing - just doing it when I need to sell my LOOT I have collected while exploring.