Runescape Smithing: What should you make?

With the recent Iron mining and ore collecting, and the ore smelting that I stopped doing at 250 iron bars, I had achieved level 24 smithing, so I headed off to Varrock to do anvil smithing of the iron bars, turning them into sellable weapons and armor while advancing my smithing further - hopefully to 30, at which point I can begin smithing steel bars.

The iron bars turned out to be enough to get my smithing up that far, but after running around through Varrock, Barbarian Village, Falador, Port Sarim and Al Kharid to sell what I had smithed, and seeing the feedback on the most recent poll about what skills I should write more about here, I thought that perhaps a more advanced discussion about the smithing process would be beneficial, even though the basics have been introduced already, back here.

The advanced tactics mentioned in the second Blast Furnace entry aimed towards members using mithril or addy can be used anywhere with bronze, iron and steel metals where an Anvil room is in close proximity to a specialty shop (Platebody shop, Platelegs shop, Axe shop, Sword shop, etc). For example:

• East of central Varrock is an Anvil that shares space with a Platebody shop.
• South of Port Sarim at the tip of the land mass is an Anvil, relatively close to Port Sarim's Axe shop.
• West Varrock anvil is a short trip from Barbarian Village helmet shop.

Something I noticed while I was doing my own sell run was that Iron kite shields are generally difficult to sell to specialty shops without those shops already having 15 or 20 or more in stock. Iron square shields, however, were generally much less represented, and therefore my iron squares sold for more than my iron kites. Iron kites are dropped by Hill Giants in the Edgeville dungeon, so even if people aren't actively smithing much that day, there'll be a lot more iron kites in circulation.

I haven't yet noticed this pattern with other smith-and-sellable objects but I'll post a second part to this topic if information comes up about it!