Guild Wars 2

now I have had this though in my head the last few days I looked around and am still not quite sure if its possible.

Okay here is what I want to do:
I want to transmute Sclerite Karka Shell skin onto an Ascended Capacitor the Shell is currently exotic. Do I need to upgrade the Shell to Ascended before I can transmute the skin onto the ascended capacitor? I don’t care if the infusion on it is lost all that matters is does it keep the infusion slot.

No, you don’t need to ascended it if you are going to be taking the stats of the capacitor. When you transmute something only the item type has to be the same not the rarity.