Planing Thick-Wall Aluminum

[JesseK]

Weight (specifically, c.g.) is a major consideration this year. In order to minimize impact on c.g., we're looking to shave some weight off of the upper portions of our lift. There are various methods to do so, each with its own associated time and strength tradeoffs, including trussing and cheese-holes.

The two rails are 2x1", 0.125" thick walls for the lift. For a 6 foot lift, that's roughly 10 pounds of rails alone. The it should be noted that the bearings for the lift have their own bearing blocks, spreading out their stresses across a 3" length of rail.

Could we safely plane the outer-facing and inner-facing wall of each rail (leaving the front-facing and rear-facing walls alone)? This would effectively take down the thickness from a 2x1x0.125 to 2x0.75x0.0625 (0.125" on the 1" legs).

Planing would save approximately 4lbs overall, but I'm curious what the tradeoffs of strength are. I'm not a ME and constantly misinterpret/misrepresent stresses in Inventor. Planing would also prevent us from the potential pitfalls of a errant CNC/mill cutting through one of our already-integrated holes. It would be a relatively simple manual operation since we have the right mill tool and would happen just before powder coating that occurs early next week.

Thoughts? Is it a good idea, bad idea, etc?