stainless tube sliding inside another stainless tube

[mackconsult]

I have taken over a job where I need to have stainless tubes slide inside other stainless tubes for a marine ladder application. The guy that designed this up didn't do a very good job of thinking about it. The top flare interferes with the inside of the mating tube as well as you can see he just extruded it and shelled it which makes it expensive to mfg as drawn up.
The customer also wants to do some bushings.

I am looking for others thoughts about how to implement this. My initial thoughts are to put a swage in on the outside tube just below the flare at the end of the inside tube. This would act as the hard stop for loads that go on the ladder in the extended position.

When folding up the ladder and extending the ladder they want a some what smooth low effort feel. So I am thinking of doing a thin PTFE bushing down at the bottom stake on the inside of the outside tube and the stake would hopefully keep the bushing in place. The one on top could also be a stake with a piece of bushing material.

No tooling has been developed for this project. It will be mfg over in china.

 

[btrueblood]

Do the swaged areas of the tubes carry the person's weight from the bottom tread up to the top bracket? Not sure I'd trust that design for a 250 lb. person. I'd trust it even less if this is installed on a swaying, tipping, heeling/yawing boat in heavy seas, where one leg sees a lot more load than the other, and the angle of loading is shifting as much as 45 degrees from vertical. Far less after the first user hammered on the treads or the tubes to collapse the structure after its first extension, when the legs bound up because they weren't evenly fed into the upper tubes. Does this assembly have to pass a safety inspection, or get a UL or other safety rating for sale in the US or other state?