You should not attempt to do any traditional welding of steel to aluminum as they can form a hard and brittle inter metallic compound known as iron aluminide. You would have to employ a process that did not melt either species.
Cladding could be an option but you are kind of limited to flat products that are sandwiched together. There is also explosive which does almost the same thing as cladding. Friction stir welding might be possible but I cant vouch for that. The temperature does get pretty hot, so I am not sure what would happen. But any of these suggestions would take specialized equipment not available to the average user.
For weight, Al is 2.7 g/cc and Iron is about 7.8 so it is about 3 times heavier for the same volume.
How strong either of them are greatly depends on specific alloys and heat treatment. I think some of the strongest aluminum alloys have a yield strength of about 50,000 psi which would relate to a relatively weak steel. For steel, there are alloys that can have yield strengths in the hundreds of thousands psi.
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