Whats More Structualy Sound????? (Steel)

[127cub]

Square metal tubing

or rectangular tubing

[cubs-n-bxrs]

What are you going to be doing with it and what wall thickness you going to be using? Tubing usually comes in 3 wall thicknesses thin, standard and heavy wall.
What outside dimensions are you dealing with. 2x3,2x4 2x2 etc. If you use heavy wall you can build a fortress out of it. I use miles of heavy wall 2x2 tubing at work to build platforms, fixture stands and anything you could possibly imagine. The stuff is bullet proof.

[127cub]

im looking at 3x2 or 3x3 3/16 thick or 1/4'' thick

Its for my fel

[cubs-n-bxrs]

1/4" wall thickness will handle any thing a front end loader on a cub can dish out.

[127cub]

yaaa but square tubing or rectangular tubbing ?????

[Matt G.]

Which is stronger or 'more structurally sound' depends on the dimensions and the orientation of the loads.

I think the biggest tubing on my loader is 1.5 x 3 x 3/16" wall. Regardless of the shape, all of it is at least 3/16" wall. 1/4" is just adding weight. The rigidity of the tubing depends one what direction it is oriented and loaded. For a loader, I'd use rectangular tubing with the top and bottom of each tube being the smaller dimension of the rectangle, and the vertical sides the longer one.

I'd also recommend you pick up a set of plans from PF engineering and follow them because they have been designed and analyzed by someone who knows what they are doing. If you blindly and arbitrarily put something together without knowing what you are doing, you'll either hurt yourself because you didn't design it properly, or spend a lot of extra money making everything bigger and heavier than it needs to be. All of the little details will be worked out in the plans. If you're having trouble deciding whether rectangular or square tubing is appropriate, you are not ready to plan out all of the other little details necessary to successfully design this. Get some plans...all of that has already been done, and all you have to do is build it. You will be far ahead in terms of time and money.

It will be cheaper yet if you can find a used loader. They are out there if you look patiently.

[ol'George]

Matt makes all good points:
The bottom line is:
The ideas you will gain,and unnessary costs prevented, will be more than offset by what the plans cost.