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There's a lady here in town that makes custom boat covers. For $100 she cobbled this together for us to replace our old canvas shade. It's a little leaky in heavy rain, but it works well enough for our purposes.
The old poles were painted steel and were a little bent up. The new poles are made of leftover oak stock from a buddy's mill. Ran them through my table saw with the blade tipped over to octagonalize them and added a post on top. Yes, they are made of oak. We're not backpacking here.
We had her add a few extra grommets to each side, which has come in handy, especially out west. In Moab and Dinosaur we ended up doubling up on the lines in the wind, and in Utah once we ended up making a "lean-to" with just two poles holding up one side and the other side staked down to keep the sand and wind off our dinner.
My dad the engineer recommended that if I was making poles for this, I should make five so I had spare one on hand in case of the inevitable. So there's a fifth pole and they get rotated through randomly.
