The Carrying Capacity of Alu. Joining Elements

In building an aluminum assembly, one must always look at the available joining elements. What are their strengths, their weaknesses and how to incorporate these joining elements into an aluminum profile based assembly. Before any decisions are made, we need to first acquire the necessary information. In the tables below, you can look up all the available joining elements in our store and their load-carrying capacity.

The most basic joining elements are screws and connector sets.  Great for less demanding applications and only require some basic thread forming and drilling before assembly. The effectiveness of screws can be improved drastically with a bolt connector, but this also increases assembly time and costs.

Aluminum brackets are the best when it comes to price-performance ratio. Capable of a direct load-carrying capacity up to 14 kN, brackets are indeed the heavyweight champions of aluminum joining elements. Be mindful of the numbers, though, in some instances, a greater offset load-carrying capacity can be achieved with a bolt connector. For aluminum brackets, the assembly is fast and easy, although when it comes to aesthetics, there is much to be desired.

If aesthetics are your concern, then I would advise the purchase of cube connectors. Unfortunately, they are limited to only a few profile combinations (30x30, 40x40 and 45x45) and have a mediocre load-carrying capacity. Their assembly is pretty simple as they only need a couple of threads to be formed pre-assembly.

The last joining elements that we need to mention are connector angles and milling connectors. These are fairly strong and are hidden inside the profile. For small and compact alu. profile-based assemblies, they are perfect.

There are indeed many aluminum joining elements to choose from and choosing the best one could be time-consuming. For this reason, we prepared a cross-reference chart (from our other article “Top 6 Joining Elements for Aluminum Profiles”) that might speed up your decision-making process.

All of the aforementioned joining elements are available in our online shop. For any additional information, feel free to browse our store or read our catalogs. We also offer technical advice to all of our customers to ensure the best solution for you at a low price.