Mobile and On-Site Welding risk assessment (NSW)
57 hazards and 450 controls for field mechanical fitters, mobile site welders and shutdown contractors, already identified and rated. Answer Yes, No or N/A online and download a finished Word report.
Tier 2 · Heavy, mobile and process work. 19 activities, 57 hazards, 450 controls.
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The 19 activities in this assessment
Every activity is assessed in three parts — Safety (17 hazards), Process Safety (11) and Occupational Hygiene (29). Untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your assessment.
✓Access to the Mobile and on-site welding online calculator, tied to the email address used at checkout. Untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your checklist, results and report.
✓A finished Word report (.docx) with every hazard, your answers, the residual risk and your Action Plan already in it — to print, sign and keep with your safety records.
✓The inherent hazard register in Word: every hazard here with what could go wrong, the possible consequence and its starting risk rating, to read before the walk and share with the people you consult.
✓A printable walkthrough checklist for marking by hand on the workshop floor.
What this pack is
Uncontrolled host-site conditions with no fixed extraction, hot work permits, fire watch, and portable generator electrical safety.
Each industry here is a complete risk assessment for one kind of workshop, with the hazards and their starting ratings already identified by a Certified Industrial Hygienist. You answer Yes, No or N/A to the controls, and the calculator works out your residual risk, builds the Action Plan and produces the finished report.
Mobile and On-Site Welding
Workplace risk assessment for field mechanical fitters, mobile site welders and shutdown contractors in New South Wales: 19 activities, 57 hazards and 450 controls across safety, process safety and occupational hygiene. Completed in the online calculator, which works out control scores, residual risk and a prioritised Action Plan and produces a finished Word report to print and sign.
- ✓57 hazards across 19 activities, each with its consequences and starting risk already rated
- ✓450 controls listed for you, ranked by the hierarchy of control — you answer Yes, No or N/A
- ✓Colour-coded residual risk and a prioritised Action Plan, worked out for you
- ✓A finished Word report to print and sign
- ✓The inherent hazard register in Word and a printable walkthrough checklist for the workshop floor
Tier 2 · Heavy, mobile and process work. 19 activities, 57 hazards, 450 controls.
Secure checkout via Stripe. Sign in and start as soon as the payment goes through.
Run more than one kind of work? See every industry
The most serious hazards in mobile and on-site welding
A sample of the 57 hazards in this assessment, each shown with its consequence and the starting risk rating given by a Certified Industrial Hygienist before any controls are counted. The controls themselves are in the calculator.
Building fire with loss of the premises and its contents, and injury or death to occupants who were unaware hot work was taking place. Hot work by contractors is one of the most common causes of major building fires. Process Safety · inherent risk 5B.
Zinc fume (metal fume fever), lead from old paint (a lead process with notification and biological monitoring duties), chromate primers containing Cr(VI), cadmium from plating, isocyanates from two-pack coatings. None of these are controlled by the arrangements in a bare mild steel workshop. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4C.
Welding fumes are classified IARC Group 1 and the exposure standard is 1 mg/m3, with manganese falling to 0.02 mg/m3 respirable from 1 December 2026. Mobile welders record some of the highest exposures in the trade, because the one control that works best is the one hardest to bring to site, and nobody measures what happens on someone else's premises. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4C.
Chronic manganese exposure causes irreversible neurological injury: tremor, rigidity, impaired balance, cognitive and mood change, resembling parkinsonism. From 1 December 2026 the workplace exposure limit falls from 1 mg/m3 to 0.1 mg/m3 inhalable and 0.02 mg/m3 respirable, a tenfold and fiftyfold tightening. Manganese typically makes up several per cent of mild steel welding fume by mass, so a workshop sitting on the 1 mg/m3 total fume limit can already be at or above the manganese limits. Manganese is normally the first limit a mild steel workshop exceeds, and it is exceeded well before total fume becomes a problem. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4C.
Crush injuries, multiple fractures, fatality. Vehicle and mobile plant incidents are consistently among the leading mechanisms of work-related fatality in Australia. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Load dropped onto a person: crush injuries, multiple fractures, fatality. Sling angle is the most common miscalculation, because working load limit falls sharply as the included angle opens up. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Entanglement and degloving, amputation of fingers and hands, severe lacerations; a workpiece drawn into the gap between wheel and work rest can shatter the wheel and eject fragments at lethal speed. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Rapidly developing workshop fire, burns, loss of premises and stock, business interruption. Process Safety · inherent risk 4C.
How one hazard is rated
Hazard S1.1 — manual handling of sections, plate and offcuts — starts at 2D, rated before any controls are counted. The calculator lists 8 controls for it, from elimination and extraction at the source down to PPE, monitoring and emergency arrangements. You answer Yes, No or N/A for each on the floor. Once the last one is answered it works out the control score, applies any severity reduction earned by physical controls, and shows the residual risk as RED, YELLOW or GREEN. Every control you answered No to goes into your Action Plan, most urgent and most effective first, ready for a responsible person and a due date.
Someone else's building, no fixed hood: the mobile welder's exposure story
A mobile welder carries the arc into places that were never designed for it: plant rooms, ceilings, voids, host workshops and occupied premises. There is no fixed extraction, and the portable unit that would do the job is often left in the ute because the job looks too short to justify setting it up. Welding fume is classified IARC Group 1 with an exposure standard of 1 mg/m3, and manganese falls to 0.02 mg/m3 respirable from 1 December 2026. Mobile welders record some of the highest exposures in the trade, precisely because dilution is worst on the jobs where extraction is missing.
The second exposure is whatever the host site contains. Steel on site may be painted, galvanised or contaminated, and cutting it can release zinc, lead from old paint, chromate or cadmium.
What makes this trade different from a fabrication shop is that the fire risk and the isolation risk travel with the welder. Hot work by contractors is one of the most common causes of major building fires, and a welder working alone at a remote site has no one to call for help after an electric shock, burn or fall. Delay is what turns an injury into a fatality, and remote work maximises it.
What an inspector checks for field and shutdown welding
The assessment starts with how the job is controlled before the first strike. It asks whether hot work in occupied and combustible premises is planned with the host, whether a fire watch is arranged, and whether you know what sits behind the wall, above the ceiling or inside the pipework you are about to cut. It then asks about your own gear: welding machines, leads, holders and torches tested and tagged, leads inspected before each use, and portable tools and RCDs tested at the required interval.
Working alone is treated as a legal gate, not a courtesy. You are asked whether high risk tasks such as confined space, work at height, hot work in voids and energised work are scheduled with a second person present; whether each job is logged in a journey management register; whether there is a check-in schedule with a documented escalation; whether a satellite or duress device is carried where coverage fails; and whether each vehicle carries a first aid kit, burn kit and extinguisher.
Lifting gear used from the vehicle or on site is checked for tags and inspection records to AS 3775, AS 4497 and AS 2741.
What a mobile welding business usually finds on the first walkthrough
Mobile operators tend to score well on personal protective equipment and on the condition of their own leads and machines, because the gear is their livelihood. The No answers cluster around portable extraction on short jobs, air monitoring of what the welder actually breathes on site, and a written check-in arrangement.
Moving hazards from yellow to green depends on the higher-order controls. Purpose-made lifting beams and plate clamps in place of improvised slinging, hooks with working safety latches and sling protectors at sharp edges, residual current protection on every portable tool run from a site outlet or generator, and a fixed cut-off saw back at base in place of grinding straight cuts on site all lift the control score further than extra instructions.
Here is what NOT RATED looks like. You are at a rural pump station on your own, with no mobile coverage and no satellite device, cutting out a bracket. Because the unconditional gates for remote work have not been met, the calculator will not give that hazard a residual score.
How your controls are scored
Not generic advice — the specific, hierarchy-of-controls measures written into the pack, matched to how these assets actually fail.
Built for the people who do this work
If you operate, maintain or contract to these assets in NSW, this pack is written for your duties.
- ✓Field mechanical fitters, mobile site welders and shutdown contractors
- ✓Owners and managers who need a risk assessment that stands up to a SafeWork NSW visit
- ✓Safety coordinators covering several workshops or several trades
- ✓Workshops whose insurer, principal contractor or client has asked for a documented assessment
- ✓Trainers and supervisors inducting apprentices onto workshop hazards
Authored to the codes and the law
The Codes of Practice and Australian Standards these documents are measured against, and the legislation behind them.
- §Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW)
- §Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 (NSW)
- §Workplace exposure standards for airborne contaminants (Safe Work Australia)
- §AS 1674.1 and AS 1674.2 — Safety in welding and allied processes
- §AS/NZS 1715 and AS/NZS 1716 — Selection, use and maintenance of respiratory protective equipment
Frequently asked questions
Add an in-house CIH risk assessment review
Complete your risk assessment using our digital engine, then have our in-house Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) and Full Member of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists (MAIOH) review your specific results to ensure bulletproof compliance.
Post-completion expert review
Not sure if you categorised your site’s controls correctly? Complete your online assessment and send us the generated report. Our in-house experts will review your residual risk scores, validate your “N/A” selections, and ensure your action plan adequately addresses your highest liabilities (like hexavalent chromium or LEL environments) before you sign off.
- Scope
- Remote CIH and MAIOH review of your completed calculator report and hazard register.
- Turnaround
- 3–5 business days.
- Pricing
- Remote review is billed at an hourly rate of $250 AUD/hour (total quote based on the number of sections reviewed).
Walk it, answer it, sign it.
The calculator generates a finished, fully formatted .docx record with your Action Plan already inside it. Print it, sign it off, and you are audit-ready for this workshop.
Price in AUD, no GST charged · Jurisdiction: New South Wales — WHS Act 2011, WHS Regulation 2025 and SafeWork NSW Codes of Practice applied
This is a generic risk assessment for a typical workshop of this kind, to support your due diligence — completing it is not compliance in itself. You must answer it for your own site, consult your workers, put the missing controls in place, and get competent advice where it says so — exposure monitoring, for example, is work for an occupational hygienist. The limits are set out at the front of every report.