Is Aluminum Extrusion Worth The Money For Your Van Build?

wow [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] is that it now i know a lot of you probably aren't looking at aluminum extrusion for skateboarding but i bet a few of you have looked at it when it comes to converting your van so in this video we're going to talk about all the good and the bad when it came to converting our van using aluminum extrusion is it worth the money i guess we'll find out [Music] they look pretty similar extrusion the adult erector set or at least that's what 80 20 calls it what is it well aluminum extrusion is basically a run of aluminum alloy that's been heated up and forced through a mold in order to obtain a specific profile or shape it's commonly sold in a square shape with a t-slotted profile which allows for hardware to be attached without the use of nails or screws extrusion is used in a variety of different ways from building bridges to the automotive industry and even in your electronics and it can come in all sorts of lengths and thicknesses and in our case we were looking at extrusion as an alternative to traditional wood framing for our walls and our bed structure now you might be able to find some extrusion at like a local metal supplier but we found that sometimes it's like limited sizes and the prices aren't that great so you'd probably have a better chance at ordering online directly from a manufacturer like 80 20 or even amazon uh we've seen a lot of people order it that way as well we worked with an 80 20 distributor called high tech and they helped us design some of the framework within our van we will note that extrusion has several key benefits but it's not the most affordable option when compared to something like lumber for example for an eight foot run of 1515 series aluminum extrusion which is pretty comparable to say a 2x2 out of lumber this guy it costs 78.72 from 80 20. that's compared to a 2 by 2 8 foot run which costs about 3.96 from home depot now you also have to consider the availability and wait times in order to receive the aluminum extrusion because it took over two months to get ours now all things considered yeah we're in a pandemic and we have broken supply chains and global production shortages but when you compare it to a 15-minute run to your local hardware store now the extrusion itself is pretty pricey but you also need to consider the hardware and fasteners that are going to put it all together 80 20 makes all sorts of flat joining plates corner brackets and gussets depending on your needs for us we planned on needing around a hundred corner brackets they have an l shape with one bolt hole on either end 80 20 sells the brackets for four dollars and 41 cents each so that would run around 441 dollars just for the brackets but in order to avoid that enormous cost luckily i have a father who works at a steel mill with a lot of aluminum sitting around so he fabricated all the brackets for us pro bono now the bolts that are required for the mounting brackets are also sold by 80 20 and they run about 69 cents a pop since you need two bolts per bracket you can go ahead and double the number of bolts you need giving us about 200 at a total of 138 bucks if you want to save some money you might be able to find a better deal on a website called mcmaster car which i'll provide a link within the description because later on we also ordered a few bolts from there so the last piece of hardware we needed were t-nuts and these secure the bolts to the back side of the extrusion channel now there's a lot of different styles for these but the ones that we went with were about 37 cents a pop with a total of about 75 dollars for 200. keep in mind that we're quoting the specific extrusion and hardware that we chose for our build and yours might end up being different depending on your needs now if you're wondering how much extrusion you're going to end up needing it's good to get an estimate of the amount of framing you're going to have within your van which could include things like your bed and your benches and maybe a wet bath or a standing closet even those like upper head cabinets all that stuff can be framed with aluminum extrusion but it really just depends on your layout now you can go the old fashioned route and draw it all out on some graph paper or you can use something like google sketchup to make a 3d rendering for free ultimately you're doing an estimate the same way that you would with lumber and the big difference being accuracy accuracy so with all the costs the additional hardware the long wait times why would anyone order aluminum extrusion so for starters each piece of extrusion is manufactured with precision which means it's going to be nice and square there's not going to be any worry of like warping like you'd have to look for when finding wood it also doesn't hold moisture or cause any mold or mildew which is a big thing to consider when you're building things within a van because you're traveling around in different climates with different humidities when it's wood you've got to really figure out where and what needs to be treated and proofed beforehand and if you attach it properly it's not going to create a bunch of squeaks and that's a real thing when living in a van using wood there's always a little squeak that you can't quite find within the van you can also construct and deconstruct the extrusion without damaging the material because you're not popping a bunch of holes in it so if you do make a mistake or want to change anything you can just pull it apart and put it back together in a different way but with all that being said we really wanted to put those pros to the test by using it firsthand so we bit the bullet and ordered some extrusion so we started out by creating our 3d model then we handed that off to high tech who then took it and recommended the amount of extrusion we would need along with the types of extrusion they thought we could use for the different areas within our van so like the bed frame would need a thicker extrusion while the bench seats would be fine with like the inch and a half stuff we ended up purchasing 276 feet of the 1515 extrusion we also purchased 36 feet of the 1530 extrusion which is the inch and a half by three inch and together they cost about 2300 for the stock 145 inch lengths that's right no cut downs no like special drilling or anything like that for their fancy hardware it was just 12 foot long cuts of extrusion and then there's the hardware like we mentioned earlier we ended up using around 200 of both the bolts and the uh the t-nuts but initially when we ordered everything we did plan on framing our whole van with the extrusions so we ordered over double that uh and bought 430 of both the bolts and the nuts which cost us around 370 yes we did save money by having my dad make our brackets for us but again it's not cheap anyway our grand total with tax and shipping ended up being around 3 425 and it could have been a lot more it could have been a lot more now after waiting over two months for our product to arrive it was time to get to work all right so at long last our aluminum extrusion is here it was 464 pounds tough guy that's a lot of extrusion all right so today we're gonna start on the bed frame we're gonna start from the back of the van and then work our way forward but i think we gotta go buy ourselves a a new blade now in order to cut your aluminum extrusion you probably need to get an aluminum cutting blade which generally has around 80 teeth we're about to cut our first piece of aluminum extrusion ever in our lives you got to get this dead to nuts guys we're about to cut like a hundred dollars right here all right let's see how it cuts [Music] that's the easiest thing i've ever cut in my life i don't think it's absolutely necessary to have an aluminum cutting blade to cut this stuff but it does make it a lot easier and by the way it's super cold out it's been super close like in the teens for the past few days so this stuff is ice cold like to the touch my hands are numb [Music] it does make a lot of debris like i don't have a bag it starts to look like you're playing with glitter and it gets everywhere and it sticks to things like we were finding extrusion within our shoes months later it's also not a bad idea to make sure that your blade is perfectly square before you start cutting because you really don't want to be off even by the slightest bit it's going to make it really difficult to mount those pieces together but for the most part cutting aluminum is pretty similar to cutting wood now putting it all together takes some patience you grab your brackets bolts t-nuts and get them all together you then slide the bracket onto the extrusion and tighten everything down with an allen key all in all the extrusion is very comparable to working with wood i think the biggest difference would be you know you're placing brackets instead of screws so the time it takes to prep your brackets and tighten them all down with an allen key compared to like taking one of those uh kreg pocket screw jigs and popping your holes and then fastening it down it's probably pretty similar it's just the pre-planning that you have to do that's going to take a little longer with the extrusion so if you have all of your measurements and you're really confident in them you can go ahead and cut all of your extrusion and put it together pretty quickly yeah right on 31 and a half if that's the right size we need we cut it real good we measure it real bad you can quickly find yourself making like a hundred or more dollars in mistakes after a single cut you know when compared to cutting the wrong thing of wood it's like a three dollar mistake right anyway we were able to build a super solid bed frame using the 1530 and we attached everything together using the brackets as well as larger bolts to like riv nuts so that it can adhere to the side of the van and we did have to like put our own holes through the extrusion using large drill bits and if you have good fits it cuts through pretty easily it's probably easier with wood but you could still do it and the final product was extremely sturdy okay so we are about to put this up for good and anywhere we have a rib nut we're going to be applying some semi uh bond semi-permanent blue thread lock that way while we're driving nothing really rattles loose on us this stuff it's sweet [Music] all right so we're gonna keep going on these we've got four on the bottom and then we've got two on the side and two on the side to have eight points of contact i just wanted to add two on the sides because these bottom ones are kind of just supports [Music] look at this it is so sturdy part of the wall feels like it's a part of the van if you move our bed frame you're shaking the entire van itself look at this it's really solid uh we have two more support brackets one here and one yeah so now we have to fit our water tank housing as well as all of our electrical housing which is gonna go here we just connected everything else uh together so it was like one solid unit so below that we built our battery and water tank holder and then the benches came off of that and off the benches we had our like sink covered as well as the standing shower which is behind us and then there's a standing closet right there and then to attach everything to the van itself we used those same brackets with some self tappers and then just adhered them to the framework of the van i would say it's probably smarter to use a rivnut with a bolt it's definitely a stronger connection which i'll probably go back and do but for time's sake we just used self tappers uh the biggest thing we were running into was the overall size of the extrusion and how much it took up inside of our like cabinets and our kitchen galley we feel we've reached a point now where we are kind of like wasting a lot of space for most of our cabinetry and stuff like that you would be using like a three-quarter inch um carcass or something like that and so we're taking up an extra inch and a half with the extrusion for our fridge here we need that inch and a half to fit sliders because this fridge is so big so i think we're going to deconstruct this portion here and just build a three-quarter inch plywood carcass type of deal so in order for us to end up flush with our bench we had about 22 inches to work with and when we used the extrusion as our framing we were taking up three inches right there inch and a half with another inch and a half in order to fit our fridge we needed over 20 inches within it so already we were too short right because if you take three inches minus 22 you're at 19. so we ended up going with three quarter inch ply to build a carcass if you look at this it's an inch and a half this is three quarter it's half the size so we ended up saving an inch and a half on the build and it had a face which that inch and a half doesn't seem like a lot but it was just enough to fit our fridge along with the sliders and the like tray the fridge sits in to come in and out of the cabinet itself and speaking of facing and finishing for the extrusion that is a whole thing we're dealing with now we initially tried using trim screws which in my head i was like okay cool if we're using extrusion and i have these compartments i need to get access to we need to come up with a way that i can put a panel on and then remove it when i need to and trim screws are really small and so what i did was take an eighth inch drill bit i sent it through the wood along with the extrusion and then took a screw a trim screw and then sent it in and attached it that way and it works if you have access like a flush access point to the extrusion itself the second i had to put it low where my drill was a little cocked at an angle i would set the hole in but then if the screw wouldn't go straight in the way i put that hole it would crack and you'd end up with something like this that is a screw that will forever live there now that i will never get out it wasn't going to be a feasible option for the entire van plus it took a lot of time so then we tried taking this wood furring strip this uh 2x2 and then attaching it to the extrusion itself with brackets on these ends and then attaching the plate to that and that works too but again it takes a lot of time and space and your weight you're adding weight doing double the framing yeah it's like reframing all of your framing with wood right so why would you use the metal if then you're gonna add wood everywhere just to be able to drill into it so since that really wasn't a feasible option for us we decided to go with a different method we are now onto glue and magnets initially i didn't want to go the glue route because you know once it's on there it's not coming off but it seems to be the quickest and easiest route and we're now having to like figure out which areas of the van won't necessarily need to be removed like underneath our cabinets or inside of our bench seat things like that and that whole process is pretty simple you know we have to cut it to the right size and then we just apply marine grade adhesive and for all the areas where we're going to need access say like the electrical compartment and our control panel we're going to try to utilize magnets which we haven't done yet you know we put a little piece of wood to the side like a tiny little guy glue it a countersink and then like glue the magnet inside of it and then on your face you're gonna do the same thing put a little forstner hole in it and then glue a magnet it'd look like that yeah and take it off but we have to find a magnet that's strong right because as we're like going down the road or like off-roading we don't want all of our walls to be falling off and we don't even know that it's going to work right and we've also seen people adhere their face plates using smaller brackets you know to the extrusion itself so it's just another l bracket on the back side which is fine for like a bench where you can get access to the back of your face uh and do that but it's not feasible for those areas where you can't you know so we're we're trying something else extrusion extrusions and extrusions choose an extrusion extrusion extrusion extrusion extrusion so after first-hand experience using aluminum extrusion uh i will probably use it again but i'm only going to use it in specific locations i thought that using it for our bed frame was good good yeah like you could probably put a baby rhino on it and that thing will hold up i also thought it was really good when we put together our electrical compartment underneath because those can weigh a lot you know batteries add up and you want to be able to have a solid structure to hold those things up especially when you're driving down rough terrain another spot i think it's pretty useful is the wet bath that's the tallest structure within our van and probably within most people's van build so you want to make sure it's square and it's also going to experience a bunch of humidity and moisture simply because the outside temperatures are going to be different from the hot inside shower temperatures so you want to know that the framework is going to hold up to that and another spot that i didn't expect to really like extrusion was on our roof we ended up modifying our roof rack using aluminum extrusion for our solar panels the aluminum it doesn't rust you can get it in black so you don't have to paint it at all and it's lighter and almost just as strong depending on the size you get other than that i think i could get away with using three-quarter or half-inch plywood uh carcasses and things like that the kitchenette our benches our overhead cabinets all that stuff can be three-quarter inch plywood and it will hold up perfectly fine and it allows for a finish that we prefer so there you have it that's our two cents we probably spent too much money on material that we ended up not using but we lived and learned yeah we appreciate you taking the time to watch this video and if you're new to the channel make sure to subscribe and you can always hit the like button and engage with us with some comments or questions maybe you have better ideas on how to face your extrusion and for everyone that's already been with us and followed along thanks so much for your continued support we really appreciate it all right guys thanks thank you see you in the next one tail and jump forward front foot like a kick yeah squat squat down jump yes yeah wow that's it guys whoa that wasn't bad oh yeah that was it you guys just saw it julie's first real ollie i'm a skater [Laughter] cool

Channel: DogCatManVan

Views: 108,976

Keywords: dogcatmanvan, dog, cat, man, van, alternative living, nomad, tiny house on wheels, living in a van, simple living, minimalism, solo travel, tiny house, van life, vanlife, van build, DIY, camper van, conversion van, promaster, tinyhome, shower in a van, van conversion, how to convert a van, ram, do it yourself van, self built van, van build tutorial, 2500, 170wb, mercedes, sprinter, sprintervan, sprinterconversion, benzsprinter, sprintercamper, campervan, aluminum, extrusion, 80/20, framing, t nuts

Id: hHF7v9b7HjE

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2022