Curious building - folds up!

[robgraham]

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

[Cicero]

================================== 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.

[Owain]

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

[robgraham]

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

[LSR]

It sounds familiar ...

[Andy Dingley]

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.