Profile Cutting Bureau risk assessment (NSW)
57 hazards and 449 controls for cNC plasma, laser and oxy-fuel plate cutting facilities, already identified and rated. Answer Yes, No or N/A online and download a finished Word report.
Tier 2 · Heavy, mobile and process work. 18 activities, 57 hazards, 449 controls.
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The 18 activities in this assessment
Every activity is assessed in three parts — Safety (16 hazards), Process Safety (11) and Occupational Hygiene (30). Untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your assessment.
✓Access to the Profile cutting bureau 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
Aerosolised metal fume, nitrogen dioxide, ultraviolet radiation, cutting table sludge handling and high noise.
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.
Profile Cutting Bureau
Workplace risk assessment for cNC plasma, laser and oxy-fuel plate cutting facilities in New South Wales: 18 activities, 57 hazards and 449 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 18 activities, each with its consequences and starting risk already rated
- ✓449 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. 18 activities, 57 hazards, 449 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 profile cutting bureau
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.
Permanent eye injury, including retinal damage that is instantaneous and painless at the moment it occurs, and skin burns. A reflected beam causes the same injury as a direct one, and fibre laser wavelengths are invisible, so there is no blink reflex and no warning. Occupational Hygiene · 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.
The sludge and filter dust concentrate everything that was cut: manganese, chromium, nickel, zinc and lead, in a very fine form. Cleaning out a table or a filter unit dry is frequently the highest exposure of the month, and it is done by whoever is available rather than by whoever is protected. 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.
Workshop fire, flash fire, explosion of a closed vessel, severe burns, fatality, loss of premises and stock. 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.
Fume at the table, beam behind the panel
A profile cutting bureau breathes thermal cutting fume. Plasma, laser and oxy-fuel machines run across the whole shift, and cutting generates fume at rates far above welding. The particles are exceptionally fine and deeply respirable, and the fume is classified with welding fume as IARC Group 1. What it carries depends on the plate on the table: manganese, zinc, hexavalent chromium, nickel, lead and the decomposition products of primers.
The health liability sits in three places. Manganese is normally the first limit a mild steel shop exceeds, and 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. Water table sludge and filter waste concentrate everything that was ever cut into a very fine form, so a dry clean-out is often the heaviest exposure of the month. And a Class 4 cutting laser can cause retinal damage from a reflected beam that is invisible and painless when it happens.
That is what separates a bureau from a general fabrication shop next door. There the arc is intermittent and the welder moves away from it. Here the machine never stops, the operator unloads parts and dross while the table is still hot, and concentrations during unloading are routinely higher than during the cut itself.
What an inspector asks to see in a cutting bureau
The assessment walks you through the machines first. On the fixed plant around the tables, the bandsaw, cut-off saw, pedestal drill, linisher and pedestal grinder, it asks whether every emergency stop is within reach and function-tested to AS/NZS 4024, and whether grinder and linisher work rests sit no more than 3 mm from the wheel with the tongue guard at 6 mm, per AS/NZS 1788. Any guard, interlock or stop that is bypassed while the machine stays in use is treated as a prohibited practice.
Then it turns to the table itself. Is the dross box and slat table cleaned to a written schedule rather than when it looks full? Are spark arrestors or drop-out boxes fitted ahead of the filter unit? Is assist gas isolated at the end of each shift and whenever the machine is unattended, and is oxygen never used to blow down the table, the machine or clothing? A machine left running outside staffed hours without fire detection and suppression is another prohibited practice.
Finally it checks lifting gear for plate handling against AS 3775, AS 4497 and AS 2741, whether incoming stock is checked for coatings before it is cut, and whether exposure to fume and manganese has ever been measured.
What your first pass through the bureau usually shows
Most bureaus answer Yes to the obvious items: the machine has extraction, operators wear eye protection, cylinders are chained. The No answers cluster around the jobs nobody schedules. Table and filter cleaning is done dry by whoever is on hand. The extraction has not been tested since it was commissioned. Nobody checks whether a customer's plate is primed, galvanised or stainless before it goes on the bed, and air monitoring has never been done.
The controls that move a hazard from yellow to green are rarely more paperwork. For plate handling it is a crane, vacuum lifter or magnet lifter rated for the stock rather than improvised slinging, and physical barriers between forklift routes and walkways. For straight cuts it is a fixed saw in place of a hand-held grinder.
NOT RATED is what you see when a gate fails. Answer No to pre-use inspection of every sling, shackle and hook, or admit that an untagged sling with no working load limit is still in the rack, and the dropped load hazard for your plate crane cannot be scored at all. The report prints it as NOT RATED and puts that control at the top of the Action Plan.
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.
- ✓CNC plasma, laser and oxy-fuel plate cutting facilities
- ✓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.