You can design complex structures made out of aluminum box extrusion, but the result is often a complex assembly that’s time consuming to make and hard to adjust. What you may want to use instead are weldments.
Weldments are a set of SolidWorks tools that lets you sketch a path, then generate an extrusion profile that follows your path. For a demonstration of how this works, watch the first 2 minutes of this YouTube video
The first step to getting weldments set up is to download the 4476 Parts Library (Check out the CacheCAD Setup page for how to add this library). Then, add the “Weldment Sketches” folder in the 4476 Parts library as a file location for “Weldment Profiles” (learn how to Add File Locations).
You’re ready to use Weldments! When using weldments, you’ll mainly be using the profiles in [Weldment Sketches → 4476 Custom → Aluminum Box Extrusion], but feel free to check out the hex shaft profiles and 8020 profiles that may come in handy for offseason projects.