Blacksmithing is a profession which allows players to craft heavy armor and weapons using metal materials. In Elder Scrolls Online, Blacksmithing consists of five activities:
1.Refinement
2.Item Creation
3.Item Improvement
4.Deconstruction
5.Trait Research

All of these happen at a blacksmithing station. Once the player interacts with it, the blacksmithing panel will open and the player will have access to the activities mentioned above.

Refinement
Refinement is used to turn your raw crafting materials into something you can work with. Refinement has its own tab in the crafting window. You’ll need 10 units of raw materials to turn them into crafting materials.

Refinement does not yield Blacksmithing experience / inspiration, but refining your ore into ingots is beneficial to you, because you have a chance to receive Tempers and Trait Materials in the process. Tempers are rare items used for Improving weapons and armor. Trait Materials are used for applying Traits.

Creating Weapons and Armor
To craft heavy armor or a weapon, you first have to choose the type of item you want to craft, such as heavy armor helm or one-handed mace. After that you select how many ingots you’re going to use to craft the item. There’s a minimum number of ingots which will give you an item with the lowest possible level requirement and stats. You can choose to use more ingots, which will increase the item’s level requirement and stats.

Improving Weapons and Armor
You are able to improve the quality of weapons and armor. Each time you improve an item, its rarity type upgrades along with its stats. There’s five levels of item rarity:
Normal (white)
Fine (green)
Superior (blue)
Epic (purple)
Legendary (orange)

Deconstruction
Deconstruction is the process of breaking down weapons and armor. This can be done from the Deconstruction tab on Blacksmithing window. Once you deconstruct an item, it will be destroyed and you’ll receive experience in Blacksmithing and some materials.

Researching Weapon and Armor Traits
Traits are buffs or special stats on items. You can only research Traits from items in your inventory that have Traits on them. The item will be destroyed, and the research process will start. The research process takes a long time, 6 hours by default, and you can only have one research active at a time. What’s more, there’s eight traits for weapons and armor, and the research time doubles for a single piece of gear after you’ve researched a trait for it. So the first trait you research for say, a helmet, will take 6 hours by default.