While digging I found some cool tubing at McMaster Carr that's designed for nesting. LOTS cheaper than my local hitch receiver tube price, though not as heavy duty. I'm not thinking of backtracking yet, but this might be interesting for anyone trying to deal with the telescoping problem. It's about half-way down the page:
http://www.mcmaster.com/#nestable-tubing

I also found this cool table fixture on the Weldingweb forum:
http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?t=31180