One of the largest single span roofs in the Southern Hemisphere crowns the latest stage of the Qantas Founders Outback Museum in Longreach, Queensland. The building, which has been designed to resemble an aircraft hangar from ground level, sits next to the original hangar operated by Qantas when it began in the 1920s.

The recently completed, 3,000 square metre building houses a theatrette, restaurant, education centre, temporary and travelling exhibition centres as well as state-of-the-art museum.

Using traditional methods, the Qantas Founders Outback Museum would have been roofed with three separate 23 metre sheets, meaning the use of unattractive step joints.

Northside Roofing used on-site mobile rollforming technology to roll 68m long sheets of KingKlip 700 profile for side to side coverage of the curved steel roof, in two colors directly onto the roof – eliminating the need for step joints and creating the clean and uncluttered lines the building deserved.

This method provided a practical alternative to traditional off-site rollforming methods – instead of using three separate 23m lengths of steel, a five tonne coil was simply fed through the onsite mill and cut to the full-span length.