So I've been using this bug for a while, if you can even call it a bug. I'm just not sure if it's intended to work like this.

If you drop a piece of heavy armor near Farkas, shields work but armor has to be higher than his standard steel armor.

Once you drop the armor, he'll ask "that heavy armor you just dropped there, I can have it yeah?". If you say yes, he'll either stand there like an icebrain (badum-tss) or go pick it up.

(I think this has something to do with his character tag being Blacksmith and not Barbarian, or Warrior or something like that, because I've had a similar occasion with the blacksmith vendor in Windhelm.)

After letting him take the armor, once you reload the area he's in, he'll be avaliable to follow you, and gives the standard "you've been a good friend to me, that means something." This allows for a heavy armor stat cheese all the way up to stat 90, which can give you a very quick boost to the level 20's and so, if you also did Faendal's archery cheese to stat 50.

Anyhow, I posted this here cause I wanted to know if anybody else has encountered this, because I didn't notice this on his character wiki page.

NPC's will fight over loot you drop. It's not related to any specific people.

Why would you do that instead of just using the console to set your heavy armor to level 90?

Playing on console edition. I haven't been able to save up enough money for a computer capable of running Skyrim at a decent fps.