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Re: Welding?
We weld a lot of aluminum, and do not profess to be pros.We had a weld break at Detroit last year, but had a spare part. the usual failure is due to heat effected zones loosing their heat treat and using thin section, there is a lot of fatigue cracks (and yes some breaks) in the post season. If you use 6061 T6 and do not post heat treat forget the T6 portion when doing your strength calcs and assume you have annealed 6061. I.E. 40KSI aluminum becomes 8KSI aluminum.
If you don't have a good welder (both machine and person running it), stick to other joint methods. There are a lot of great teams that avoid welding. If you have a good welder (both machine and person) You can do some amazing weight saving. Make sure you make spares of high impact parts because the loads they take may shock you.
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