Cool take on van builds but many ways to skin a cat. If you’re going aluminum instead of wood why not just tig weld everything? (Can think of pro/cons both ways but I bias towards weld)
I’ve seen the extruded aluminum on McMaster before and wasn’t familiar with any applications for it. It’s cool the joints are Allen key
A few issues with welding: One of the benefits of profile extrusion is the ability to work and rework it by just adding/removing/cutting pieces. Welding may interfere with this. Welding aluminum is also tough (though obviously not impossible). The heat also can lead to warping of the pieces, which probably isn't a big deal in van life, I was trying to use it as part of making good flat planes for a workbench.
1. Welding takes a lot longer than bolting two profiles together.
2. TIG welding is pretty difficult, so most people would have to hire a contractor to do it, making it very expensive.
3. It's hard to make welded stuff to high accuracy. If something doesn't fit, it takes a lot of time to fix it. With bolts it is trivial to fix bad alignment.
This, and why isn't there any fiberglass construction? Since most of the build isn't structural, you could use cheap insulation foam for the core (with epoxy resin, not polyester).
Fiberglass is quite easy to DIY and requires almost no tools, and no power tools. Most parts can be shipped in normal sized boxes, aside from the fabric. Whereas long tubes of 8020 need to be shipped via special handling. The fabric can be obtained locally from many hardware stores.
For sure, it’s tradeoffs all the way down. Fiberglass would lend well to a “production builder” that’s looking to leverage a mold for reproducibility. But I also do one-off fiberglass stuff so it has its place there too.
Your van is one accident away from getting completely totalled and destroyed. Van lifers that do it for while and not just for the Instagram attention prefer something they can rip out and reuse in a new build because they will inevitably be changing vehicles in the near to medium future.
If the difference between moving something from one totalled van to a new one comes down to if you want to screw things in vs. permanently weld them... take the screw tradeoff.
