If you're swimming in mechanical parts, as you're likely to be if you play the "will it wrench?" game, you're better off selling stacks of lockpicks than forged iron.
If you're a miner, selling mass rocks, clay, sand, and lead will earn money
If you have a point into lockpicking, lockpicks sell for far more than their component parts, though they craft somewhat slowly and require a workbench.
Otherwise mass producing junk turret ammo - using workbenches to do the crafting for you - will still net you gobs of money.
Questing nets a fair amount of money, and often the rewards are less than useful....so check the highest sell price and sell it right back. Once you hit level 3 quests are are getting Q3-4 tier 3 items, you can net a good 800-1500 per quest reward on top of the dukes you make (Q3, T3 items sell around 750, a Q4 auger or chainsaw will get you in the vicinity of 1300-1600)
Knowing what sells and what doesn't also helps.
Animal fat sells about 1-2 dukes each and stacks high
old cash sells about 1.75 dukes each, and you can occasionally find several hundred in a chest or zombie bag
electronic parts can sometimes be harvested at absurd rates far beyond what you need, and stack high for later selling
duplicate magazines sell for 100, duplicate schematics for 160
jars and cans and bottled water sell kinda poorly, but they're still worth 1 or more each and again, they stack high
Quality 3 or higher items in final loot boxes of POIs will always sell better than their parts, and are usually worth spending a repair kit to fix before selling.
Basically, if you aren't returning from nearby POIs unbelievably encumbered by random crap to sell to traders, you're missing out on potential money. I tend to be scraping for dukes the first 7-10 days while i try to buy up all the books, schematics, useful mods, clothing, and workstations at the trader, and after that my income from questing and knowing what turns a tidy profit while looting gives me the money to buy pretty much everything I could want on the restocks after that. I can usually regularly afford to buy a fergettin elixir by day 15...without any special effort to save up, unless I was trying specifically to buy a finished motorcycle or 4x4
. There's a crap ton of it...
