I can't tell if I'm doing this wrong or if there's just no way to automate crafting, but so far, honestly, this feels bad to play.
The fact that the little weapon stand A) sucks up materials like ore for them to fight with when you walk by it, even if you very much do not want it to do that and B) can't be set to automatically balance swords and shields so your soldiers always have one of each feels extremely stupid. At most that should be an extremely early upgrade to unlock.
Similarly, making the weapons stand bigger should also be an extremely early upgrade so you aren't stuck waiting around for enough little guys to come through and use up all the swords and shields you're producing.
And finally, as far as I can tell, there isn't any true way to idle this? Everything comes to a grinding halt if you aren't personally ferrying items back and forth between tables and crafting them. So it's a constant stream of frustration between having your hands full of less-than-optimized items, your stupid little soldiers running off with just a shield or just a sword because you dropped an entire stack of one or the other onto the stand, and running out of materials.