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Andrew,
If you don't want the existing steel tube for anything and just wish to build an identical lighter replacement tube. I would do the following:-
I would use the existing steel tube as a template (mould) and build a new carbon fibre tube. You build it in 2 halves then join them together. Carbon Fibre is similar to fibreglassing where you use the Carbon Fibre Matt then the appropriate resin, excepting of course that it costs a lot more but is also much stronger and lighter than fibreglass. Carbon Fibre actually looks really neat if you do a good job because the gold matt shows through the black resin and gives a really nice appearance and you can polish it to a high lustre. If you have done any fibreglassing at all you should be fine.
Another cheaper option than carbon fibre is to use normal fibreglass matting with vinyl resin as opposed to the normal polyester resin. Vinyl resin is a lot stronger than polyester resin so you could make the tube with much thinner walls for the same strength and thus a little lighter than normal fibreglass. Personnally I would be going with Carbon Fibre, I have seen a couple of Carbon Fibre OTA's and they look pretty smick.
CS-John Bambury
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