CAQA Ironbark Engineering
Ironbark Engineering is a jobbing engineering firm that fabricates structural and plate steel, machines precision components and maintains rotating plant for mining, quarrying, food processing and water utility customers. A typical week in the Dandenong South works includes conveyor frames and guarding for a quarry, a stainless steel hopper for a food manufacturer and a batch of repaired pump shafts for a regional water authority. The business trades on repeatability: every job is built from a drawing, a job card and a documented weld or machining record, so the customer receives the same quality whether the job is a single bracket or a forty tonne structure.
The company runs three sites. Dandenong South holds the head office, the fabrication workshop with two bays, an overhead crane and a paint and blast area, and the central stores. Wodonga is the precision machining centre with CNC turning and milling, a coordinate measuring machine and a small toolroom. Gladstone is the field maintenance base that sends fitters, boilermakers and a mobile welding unit to customer sites for planned shutdowns and breakdown call-outs. The workshops run a day shift from 6:30 am and an afternoon shift to 10:30 pm when the order book demands it. Field crews work to the customer's shutdown roster, including weekends.
Quality, safety and environmental performance are managed through one integrated management system certified to the quality management standard ISO 9001. Welding is carried out to qualified procedures under the Australian Standard for structural steel welding, with welder qualifications and weld records kept for every code job. Hot work, isolation and lockout, confined space entry and crane operations are controlled by permits and written procedures. Incidents and hazards are entered in the WHS incident register within the shift and reviewed by the Quality and Safety Manager each week. Coolant, cutting oil, blast media and welding fume are managed under the site environmental management plan and the Victorian environment protection duty.