I have tried it, and it isn't a particularly good way. The resistance changes a lot with the mechanical stress on the tube, and most noticeably with the temperature and pressure at the end connections. Humidity also greatly affects the resistance.
If you want cheap high energy HV resistors, salt water is the way to go. http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/hv/rwater.htm
Or, string up a bunch of smaller resistors (figure 1 kV per 2W resistor, being safe.. choose your values so they don't dissipate more than 1/2W, or the value starts to change because of self heating).
Big old wirewounds also work and are cheap when bought surplus. A few kV per inch of length, run them much less than rated power, and make sure you use more than one in series/parallel, in case it fails because of a ding or nick in the wire. Don't use the aluminum cased ones (as from Dale).
Another cheap resistor is to spraypaint on an insulating tube with conductive paint. Some (but not all, you have to check) flat black spray paint uses carbon black as the pigment.
I've also tried using static dissipative paint, as used on flooring in ESD safe areas, painted onto a substrate (e.g. PVC pipe). if you can get some of the paint cheap(free), this works fairly well, although the resistance isn't very stable and it is definitely humidity sensitive. If you have to buy the paint, it isn't very cost effective, because minimum order quantities are typically 5 gallons, and the stuff is $30+/gallon.
Created on Tuesday, March 27, 2001 7:22 PM EDT by James Lux