I couldn't get an adequately polished finish on the outside of the tubes, so I decided to go for a gloss white finish on the outside. Obviously, all interior components have to be flat black.
Click to enlarge
The exterior finish looks better in the picture than it does in real life--I'm afraid that spray paint doesn't come out as professional looking as I would like.
I'm buying the square aluminum tubes today that will hold the lower and upper assemblies in position.
UPDATE: I thought that I was buying the square aluminum tube today, but when I arrived at work, I decided to see if I could find a better deal online. I didn't find a better deal (the price s were actually somewhat higher online--and that's before figuring shipping), but I found a lot more sizes available to me, including 1" square with 1/8" wall, and 1 1/4" square with 1/8" wall. But I didn't have my handy-dandy spreadsheet for calculating deflection with me, so I waited until I got home.
The gain from going to a 1/8" wall from 1/16" wall was about 3/10,000ths of an inch less deflection at the mirror end--and it increased the weight for all three tubes from 5.03 pounds to 9.39 pounds. Why bother?
I guess I'll buy the 1/16" wall tubes tomorrow. We've been having glorious weather--not consistently clear at night, but often enough that I want to get Big Bertha 2.0 operational. The tubes cost $2.07 per foot, so it is less than $40 for all three.
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