No. As Jeff stated, you cannot use aluminum rods. The ball bearings would eat into the aluminum in no time, leaving you with a gummed up, non moving, or sloppy moving, pile of useless junk. Besides that, the aluminum rods(or regular steel rods, even) are not fabricated to a precision diameter. You need to purchase precision, hardened shafts. You can buy shafts from one vendor, and the bearings from another, if you needed to do that. They do not have to be a "matched set" or anything like that. 16mm rods purchased from one vendor should fit 16mm bearings from any other vendor.