Where do elves get metal?

[Zigûr]

I'm currently in the process of making final emendations to my successful PhD thesis on Professor Tolkien and utopianism (ie I should be graduating in September but a few small changes have been requested prior to final submission), and this has involved touching upon Dr. Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit. I was particularly interested in reading the passages of the short-lived 1960 "rewrite", which includes among other things a new episode featuring a broken bridge, the Last Bridge of The Lord of the Rings. Dr. Rateliff muses that in this version of events "clearly Elrond must have restored it sometime in the intervening years" but later makes the following remark:

While Elrond's maintenance of the road makes sense and is in keeping with his role as the preserver of the last vestiges of the North Kingdom, it is hard to picture the elves of Rivendell working at road-mending, since throughout the legendarium the elves are never associated with road-making.

While it is true that we hear very little of Elf-roads in the texts, although there was a path through Mirkwood used by Thranduil's people, it does not seem unreasonable to me to imagine Elves being capable of restoring and maintaining bridges and roads where necessary given their talent in so many other crafts.

With no disrespect intended to Dr. Rateliff, I wonder if this speculation also arises from this curiously common assumption that Elves were averse to manual labour.