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Hello Dazeford
Over on Cloudy Nights in the Obs forum there is a guy who backs up his comments with engineering calcs, basically what he is saying is that you will see little if any improvement going from say 200mm pipe to 300mm pipe, gussets look good but don't really increase the stiffness of a steel pier.
Filling the tube with sand ( I've never heard of foam before ) or concrete again isn't really doing anything for stiffness.
What my take away from the ongoing comments he is making to questions is that we all over build our mass bases.
I did to, my mass base is about 6 tons with a 250mm 8mm wall thickness gusseted pipe on top, the pipe is bolted to the block with 8 16mm threaded rods about 1m long, leaning on or bumping the top of the pier shows no movement on screen ( 11" sct on top )
My advice would be to do what you are comfortable with keeping in mind your budget and skills, don't over think it just get on with it.
Ed
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