Why? Are you selling them for runes or shards? (Can't remember what I heard on that topic) or just making space for FA?
Just making space for the FAs. All lvl 1 AWs are very easily rebuilt afterwards. And I don´t upgrade them further because of the tourney formula that punishes AW levels. So the ones I like, but don´t absolutely need, I keep at lvl 1 (the most efficient level in terms of benefit per lvl).
And yes you can use AWs to break rune shards. Just fill the runes shards in the rune circle: some break in the process, once you have 10 broken ones you can use them to forge 1 rune shard of any kind you like (so a different AW from the one you use for breaking obviously). Once you have forged the 10 broken shards into 1 new one, go back to the one you don´t like and add more to its rune circle (breaking more shards) etc.
Eventually by good (or in this case bad) luck you will add the last rune shard to the circle and complete it. When that happens you need to build the AW, then sell it and you can start over with an empty rune circle
You can of course do that on all the AWs you don´t like and that way very easily and quickly get the rune shards together for the AWs you do like. Of course you will be breaking hundreds of rune shards for a full rune circle (usually that´s not necessary as you most likely have a few rune shards of the good AW already in and you only need to fill in the last few shards), but who cares if you only break garbage you can´t use for anything else anyway.