A Question About Aluminum Strength

#1
I, being not a fabricator and lacking in fabricating equipment, had an idea. (That I may need to be talked out of...)

I want a rear interior cargo rack for my Xterra and they cost too much to purchase at over $500 shipped, which got me to thinking about making my own.

I have little welding experience and have not done so for 20 years and I have no equipment, so I first thought of PVC pipe. As luck would have it, I have even more common sense than what God gave gravel, so that idea was lost in about 12 seconds.

Then I thought about using aluminum tubing and brazing it together. What do you master fabricators out there think? Is it doable? Will it be strong enough? All it would be is vertical supports secured to the cargo channel in the floor attached to a horizontal frame with either a criss-cross of tubing, expanded metal or plywood for a floor. How strong is a brazed joint?

Thank you.
 
#3
Look at some of the companies that make storage for XJ and other generic stuff like that. Could find something cheaper probably.

If you make it yourself, make it bolt up, you could likely make it so you could store it away when not in use.


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#4
One alternative is to buy a rack for an XJ and fab up some brackets to mount them to the channels.

So, brazing isn't that strong then, eh?

Typed on a phone where my fingertip spans across three or four keys creating lots of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
 
#5
A properly brazed joint would be plenty strong enough. I would suspect that you would be close to the price of just buying on by the time you built it though. Aluminum tubing is pretty pricey and brazing rod/flux for aluminum isn't cheap. I would think you could get someone to fab you one up for pretty cheap.
 
#6
You could buy extruded aluminum shapes and bolt it together also. And have tons of places mount stuff.


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#7
I have made 2 racks / baskets for my kayak and brazed them and they will hold a lot of weight and made free standing deer stands brazing it together, all was made out of EMT conduct.
 
#8
I like the extruded channel idea. I could use it for the horizontal top frame mitred at 45°.

Typed on a phone where my fingertip spans across three or four keys creating lots of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
 
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