How to make inside of tube reflective?...tia sal

There's a chrome like color in spray cans that you can buy at hobby stores and home improvemnet stores. The results are OK, but usually get dull over time, especially when touched. If the basematerial is conductive, you can also have it chromed via a car parts store. Also, you can polish a pice of aluminum an bebd it to fit inside your pipe. The easiest an cheapest thing, but also at mediocre quality and only in one available size, would be to buy a polished or chrome clothes bar, those rather sturdy pipes that go inside your closet, and polish the inside with some rotating fabric.

coat the inside of the tube with

Try your local art shop for plastic mirror foil. Roll it up and insert in tube. Will give better results than trying to paint the inside of a tube!

--How reflective and what material is the tube made of?

-- "Steamboat Ed" Haas : Just another fart in Hacking the Trailing Edge! : the Elevator of Life...

---Decks a-wash in a sea of words---

the inside of the tube with

40 years ago, I would have said look in the Yellow pages under mirrors, for a re-silvering shop. These people would use a modification of "John A. Brashear's " silvering process. In this process a Silver Nitrate/Ammonium Hydroxide solution would be Reduced to a metallic Silver film on any surface using a Glucose solution . This is very much equipment simpler than Vaccumn evaporation for large or irregular objects. This is or was the method of choice for "Thermos Bottles", Dewar Flasks.

Most "Silvered objects are now Vaccumn Coated with Aluminum, very cheaply once you acquire a suitable Chamber.

For a one time, application 25 grams of Silver Nitrate would probably coat several square Meters. A tube would be simple to silver, using the tube itself as your reaction chamber. I did silver my first Telescope Mirror using this method. I recently Aluminized it in a Vaccumn Chamber, very much cleaner and easier, but then how many people have easy access to an Electron Microscope Lab.

Yukio YANO

If it's a metal tube you could get it chrome plated easily.