Just for clarity and to help thinking about how strong this stuff is or is not, there is no such thing as an aluminum stud. They are all steel of different thicknesses, and sometimes the color relates to the strength.



Larry's idea looks like the best by far. And maybe he has seen what I saw last week.

I saw a shop under construction where they have several walls which will have hanging cloth and carpet samples. I mean the upside-down "L" shaped things, one every three to six inches, where each one might hold a hundred pounds of stuff.

Here's what they are doing:

The whole building is steel stud construction, but this area has 2x4s of red steel. That is at least 1/16" thick, or more than double the thickness of your standard steel stud. They have done EXACTLY what larry suggests, except they are putting in chunks of 4 x 10 wood, with the grain running sideways, and they are doing this at about five feet and two feet for a lateral length of about twenty feet. MAN IS THIS STRONG!

The steel is already strong, the wood makes a really beefy place to bolt into, and the repeated double-captivated pieces of wood make a place in the wall that just cannot be twisted, so the wall is hardly going to give at all with thousands of pounds on it.