Meet Andy - your Rustic Tub creator

In 2003, whilst on a trip to Norway, I had the chance to go in a very rustic hot tub. It had been built by the owners Grandfather and handed down to the Grandson. It was like an old whiskey barrel with a steel drum in it that had a chimney welded to it. The fire was made in the steel drum, and eventually the water was hot enough to get into. A couple of years later, whilst living in Scotland, I decided to try and replicate the Norwegian tub. The first prototype was a disaster, and took 3 months of swelling to hold even a couple of inches of water. The second tub had some major improvements, thicker wood, better construction, smaller diameter etc. and was able to at least hold water. The difficulty was finding a way of heating up the tub.

After many failed attempts at welding up my own stainless steel heaters which proved far too small to get more than the top few inches of water warm. I headed off to find a weldor to fabricate a huge version in aluminium. I found Billy Tomlinson from Kilmarnock college, an excellent weldor who fabricated a water tight firebox. This worked perfectly, and then Rustic Tubs was able to go from concept to company. The first customer was Mr. Baird in December 2006 who had a tub built by me after work in the pitch black on a frigid night in Dundee, finishing around 3am. Unsurprisingly his tub was not the best, and approx 3 weeks later, I had to replace his tub with one that actually held water! 

After a couple of years of experimenting with various electric heating options I formulated a system comprising of a swimming pool pump, filtration and pool heater to allow more versatility for the tub.