Well this has alwas bothered me a bit in TES, hammers for some reason are to repair a large assortment of items from armor, bows, staves, etc...

I don't mind that much but how come we can take an item from 0 repair and take it to a 100 when all we have is a hammer and repair it to full condition?

I think maybe items should only be repaired to a certain limit depending on skill and other factors like level of armor,etc.
I think this could make blacksmiths a more needed commodity. You could either just pay him the full price to fix the armor or pay him to use the forge and repair your armor yourself which will be cheaper depending on your skill in smithing/armourer.

Also a smitty would also be another reason to own a house. Free of charge. Say you have a high disposition with the smitty he may jst let you use his work area for free.

Anyone have any ideas to expand on armourer or repairing weaponry? Like bows require different tools or something?

Yeah the repair system was a bit simple in Oblivion. How do you repair a bow with a hammer if anything that would make it worse. Bows should have specialist tools, yeah and perhaps using a smithy could be more effective than just using a hammer half way up a mountain.

May be wrong here but hasn't 'smithing' (or something like that) been confirmed as a skill? If so perhaps that'll replace 'repair' and the repair hammers and you'll have to use an actual forge to fully repair your arms and armour. Repair hammers for emergency 'field' repairs to hold your gear together while you get to a forge?

It'll probably be merged with smithing.

Also hopefully it's made more realistic, I mean you can't repair a broken cuirass with a hammer and no fire, spare metals, or anvil.

And as mentioned before wooden wepons such as bows would need something different for repairs.

I don't know how I feel about them making drastic changes to the repair system...

I saw another thread about repair, but I forgot to post my idea. basically it would work like it dose now, but rather then just hammers. You would have a choice of tools calipers, hammers, something else or wet stones. You can repair your weapon with any tool you want, but depending on what tool you pick. Your weapon will receive a buff that last till you have to repair it again. For example: lets say you repair your sword with a wet stone, that weapon now has a small damage boost that last till you repair it again. It's a small change meant to give the player more choice when it comes to repairing items.

There should really be a "temporary condition" and "quality condition" for weapons. Temporary condition would basically be the same thing it is in MW/OB, and then "Quality Condition" would affect how quickly the Temporary Condition deteriorates. Hammers (or better yet, some sort of "smiths tools") could be used to raise the Temp condition of the weapon, but if you don't take your weapons to a proper blacksmith every once in a while, they will begin to deteriorate really quickly until you do take it in for a full refurbishing.

Or it could be done so that weapons simply don't deteriorate so bloody quickly like they do in Oblivion, and you could simply take them to a smith workshop for repairs every once in a while. Carrying hammers around was sort of silly anyways.