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Tuff Shed Inc. is back in town, with a brand-new assembly plant and retail display space near Interstate 10 and South Palo Verde Road.

If you're a longtime Tucsonan, you may have thought the Tuff Shed folks never left.

But they're not the guys with the dump truck sitting on top of the shed. That would be a company now known as The Original Shed & Garage Co., 3424 S. Campbell Ave.

The confusion is understandable, though, at least if you were around in the 1980s, when Tuff Shed was all over local TV with its ads and located where The Original Shed & Garage Co. is now.

That's not just a coincidence. The head of The Original Shed & Garage Co., Spencer V. Brown, was one of the founders of Tuff Shed and used the Tuff Shed name.

But Tuff Shed — at least what was to become the far bigger part of it — left Tucson in the late 1980s. It expanded almost as fast as the competitor's shed did when dropped from a crane in those old Tuff Shed TV commercials.

Tuff Shed Inc. was founded in Idaho in the early 1980s, opened a manufacturing plant in Salt Lake City, and in the mid-1980s, it opened its second plant in Tucson, said Phil Worth, Tuff Shed Inc.'s marketing director. The company, which posted sales of $192 million in 2007, is now headquartered in Denver.

Tuff Shed Inc., the nationwide shed company, now has 53 factories throughout the country and sells its sheds through more than 1,500 Home Depot stores.

Workers at the new Tucson Tuff Shed plant, 3310 E. Gas Road, build doors, wall sections, rafters and trusses, Worth said. Then the sheds are trucked to customers' houses and assembled.

The plant employs five carpenters and three administrative and sales personnel, said Rich Dell, general manager of Tuff Shed Inc.'s new Tucson operation.

Neither shed company's officials want to say much about the other. Both sides were reticent to discuss the name "Tuff Shed" and its relation to "the guys with the dump truck sitting on top of the shed."

When pressed, Spencer V. Brown, president and CEO of VSB Inc., the parent company of The Original Shed & Garage Co., had a few cautious words: Yes, there was a connection between the companies. He was one of the founders of Tuff Shed. But there's no connection between the two companies now, he said.

The reincarnated Tucson Tuff Shed will have a grand opening on Jan. 16 and 17.