Quote:
Originally Posted by MCahoon
From my experience, the 1x1 I get at Home Depot here is 1/20 in. wall. Light for an arm by itself, but when used to stiffen it could be sufficient.
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It likely is. When I took Aero Structures last semester, one of our homework assignments was meant to drive home the fact that a closed section (like a tube with a square or circular cross section) is significantly more resistant to twist than an open section (imagine a tube after you've run a sawzall down one side).
You can show that for the same stress a circular thin walled closed structure (like a length of tubing) can carry
60x the torque of the equivalent structure with a slit down one side.
In layman's terms, you get about 60x less twist once you close the structure. Tubing is your friend.
