I visited a friend in his new house today - remote cottage in Ayrshire
- and he showed me a rather curious building which is now his workshop
and I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about it.

It's about 20 ft square and 10 high with an aluminium panel roof of
quite a shallow angle, but the real curiosity is that both the roof
and floor panels are hinged such that at an estimate the whole
building is no more than about 6 to 8 ft wide when folded. Possibly
the length was two sections bolted together. The walls might be Ally
too as there appeared to be rivets there, and the windows are steel
frame.

Anybody any ideas what the history of this might be ?

Thanks

Rob

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:21:21 -0700, robgraham wrote:

I visited a friend in his new house today - remote cottage in Ayrshire -
and he showed me a rather curious building which is now his workshop and
I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about it.

It's about 20 ft square and 10 high with an aluminium panel roof of quite
a shallow angle, but the real curiosity is that both the roof and floor
panels are hinged such that at an estimate the whole building is no more
than about 6 to 8 ft wide when folded. Possibly the length was two
sections bolted together. The walls might be Ally too as there appeared to
be rivets there, and the windows are steel frame.

Anybody any ideas what the history of this might be ?

Thanks

Rob

==================================
It might be the remains of a mobile exhibition unit. Is there any evidence
that it had wheels / chassis?

This firm in Telford used to make caravans for show purposes more or less
as you describe. The roof was hinged at the top, the floor (in sections)
folded down and then an inner wall concertinaed outwards to support the
roof.

http://www.torton.com/

Cic.

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Using Ubuntu Linux
Windows shown the door
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On 31 Jul, 23:17, Owain wrote:
robgraham wrote:
It's about 20 ft square and 10 high with an aluminium panel roof of
quite a shallow angle, but the real curiosity is that both the roof
and floor panels are hinged such that at an estimate the whole
building is no more than about 6 to 8 ft wide when folded. Possibly
the length was two sections bolted together. The walls might be Ally
too as there appeared to be rivets there, and the windows are steel
frame.

If it's old enough, some form of post-war emergency housing - a lot of
post-war things were made of aluminium because there was no steel and
the former aircraft factories had the facilities for working with it.
(Land-rover body panels, furniture, ...)

Owain

This was more my thinking - the owner was inclined to make it war-time
rather than post war, but the windows and the use of aluminium as the
cladding made me go for post war and as you say, emergency housing.
The reason for the post was to see if there was anyone who had more
details. It was the concept of the hinged roof and floor that was
intriguing.

Rob

robgraham wrote:
I visited a friend in his new house today - remote cottage in Ayrshire
- and he showed me a rather curious building which is now his workshop
and I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about it.

It's about 20 ft square and 10 high with an aluminium panel roof of
quite a shallow angle, but the real curiosity is that both the roof
and floor panels are hinged such that at an estimate the whole
building is no more than about 6 to 8 ft wide when folded. Possibly
the length was two sections bolted together. The walls might be Ally
too as there appeared to be rivets there, and the windows are steel
frame.

Anybody any ideas what the history of this might be ?

Thanks

Rob

It sounds familiar ...
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/clas...heinlein2.html

--
LSR

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:17:06 +0100, Owain
wrote:

If it's old enough, some form of post-war emergency housing - a lot of
post-war things were made of aluminium because there was no steel and
the former aircraft factories had the facilities for working with it.

They also had plenty of scrap aircraft to melt down to make it.

For that reason, most of the post-war light-alloy construction
(including Landies) isn't aluminium but is an alloy like "Birmabright",
about 10%-15% magnesium. This is stiffer than aluminium (handy for
aircraft skins) but also suffers more from corrosion. If the "ally"
you're looking at seems especially prone to white powdery corrosion then
it may be this type of alloy, strongly suggesting that it's immediately
post-war.