<VV> Metal Expert Help Needed

[Western Canada CORSA]

Some of you may have taken the time needed to read my rather lengthy summary
of my adventure bringing back a '61 Rampside with Scamper Camper back from
Yuma a week or so ago.  The RS needs to be gone over for a safety inspection
before I can get it plated in BC, and thats going to require a bit of work.
To get the work done, the camper had to come off.

To get the camper off and into a storage place we rented some "Brophy
Jacks".  After using them I've decided the Brophy Jacks are going to be a
better solution than Plan "A", which was the reinforce the structure, which
would have required basically gutting the camper, so that "Hijackers" could
be installed, which may have been problematic anyway as the longest reach
any Hijacker has is 31/32 inches, a few short of what is required to get the
Scamper out of a RS bed.  The Brophy Jacks did the job, and won't require
the reinforcement of the Hijackers.

The Brophy Jacks are essentially a 6ft steel tube with a tripod base.  a
steel sleeve rides on the tube, and mounted to the sleeve is a piece of
angle iron that lifts the wings on either side of the camper.  The sleeve is
drawn up the tube by a trailer winch mounted to the sleeve who's cable runs
up to the top of the tube over a wheel and then back down to the sleeve.  As
you crank the winch it pulls itself, the sleeve and the angle iron assembly
up the tube until the camper is high enough to roll the RS out from
underneath it.  The only problem is standard Brophy Jacks are too short to
get the Scamper Camper out of the uniquely shaped Rampside Bed.

So we've elected to make our own Brophy Jacks (it'll cost us about half of
what over-the-counter ones will to boot).  The steel tube on the rental
Brophy jacks is a 2"OD and (it's actually two tubes, one welded inside the
other) has a 0.30" wall thickness.  We were out looking at tubing today
(stupidly we measured the rental units dimensions after looking at steel
stock) and while at the steel place we noticed the aluminum tubing they had
as well.  Now I know this is probably a bit of a long shot, but I thought
I'd ask...

8ft of the required steel tubing is going to be awfully damn heavy, I'm
hoping we might be able to use an aluminum support tube instead.  Does
anybody know what kind of wall thickness we'd need to get the same strength
out of an aluminum tube?  The big requirement with the tube is that it be
resistant to bending.  When we were using the rental Brophy Jacks, the tube
was actually bending in towards the camper, to the point that the tip was
almost touching the camper.

Regards,
Joel