Solid Timber Joinery and Architectural Woodworking risk assessment (NSW)
Secure your legal baseline with a diagnostic tool authored by a Certified Industrial Hygienist: 51 hazards and 303 controls for joinery shops, stair and window makers and architectural woodworkers, already identified and rated. Answer Yes, No or N/A online and download a finished Word report.
21 activities, 51 hazards, 303 controls. One industry, one login.
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The 21 activities in this assessment
Every activity is assessed in three parts — Safety (21 hazards), Process Safety (10) and Occupational Hygiene (20). Untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your assessment.
✓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.
✓Access to the Solid timber joinery online calculator, tied to the email address used at checkout. Answer Yes, No or N/A on a phone or tablet; 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 prioritised Action Plan already in it — to print, sign and keep with your safety records.
✓The health surveillance pathway: when health monitoring is required, a medical referral form for the registered medical practitioner, and a worker respiratory symptom questionnaire.
✓An inspection readiness checklist for a SafeWork NSW visit, and an annual review template.
What this pack is
Generic safety templates leave you with most of the work and all of the liability. A solid timber joinery business that has not managed the 1 mg/m³ hardwood dust standard, plicatic acid in Western Red Cedar as a respiratory sensitiser, and amputation at open-cutter spindle moulders is exposed to regulatory action, and those are the hazards a general template handles worst.
Hardwood dust as a nasal carcinoma exposure, thicknesser and spindle moulder entrapment, manual handling of long stock and finishing chemicals.
Each industry here is a complete risk assessment for one kind of woodworking business, 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.
Solid Timber Joinery and Architectural Woodworking
Workplace risk assessment for joinery shops, stair and window makers and architectural woodworkers in New South Wales: 21 activities, 51 hazards and 303 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.
- ✓51 hazards across 21 activities, each with its consequences and starting risk already rated — the inherent hazard register, in Word, is yours to download at once
- ✓303 controls listed for you, ranked by the hierarchy of control — you answer Yes, No or N/A in the online calculator
- ✓Colour-coded residual risk and a prioritised Action Plan, worked out for you; air monitoring goes on the plan wherever it is a missing control
- ✓A finished Word report to print and sign — attach it to your hazard register and you are audit-ready
- ✓The health surveillance pathway with its medical referral form and worker symptom questionnaire, an inspection readiness checklist and an annual review template
21 activities, 51 hazards, 303 controls. One industry, one login.
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 solid timber joinery
A sample of the 51 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.
Explosion rupturing the collector or silo, fireball, secondary explosion in the building, fatalities, loss of premises. Process Safety · inherent risk 5B.
Secondary explosion across the whole building, which in dust incidents causes most of the deaths and damage. Process Safety · inherent risk 5B.
Sanding produces the highest wood dust exposures in joinery and furniture work and the finest particles. Wood dust is classified by IARC as Group 1, carcinogenic to humans (sinonasal cancer), with the strongest evidence for hardwoods. It is a respiratory and dermal sensitiser: occupational asthma, rhinitis, dermatitis. The WEL is 1 mg/m3 for hardwood and 2 mg/m3 for softwood (8-hour TWA, inhalable); mixed species are assessed against the hardwood limit as a professional default. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4D.
Short, very high wood dust exposures for the cleaner and bystanders; the fine fraction most associated with disease. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4D.
Crush injuries, multiple fractures, fatality. Mobile plant is consistently among the leading mechanisms of work-related death in Australia. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Crush injuries and fatality; struck-by injuries from recoiling strapping. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
How one hazard is rated
Hazard S1.1 — manual handling of long and heavy timber — starts at 3D, rated before any controls are counted. The calculator lists 7 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.
Hardwood dust and cedar asthma: the exposure behind a bespoke joinery
A solid timber joinery makes doors, windows, stairs and architectural mouldings from sawn stock, and almost every step makes dust. Ripping on the multi-rip saw, planing, moulding on the four-sided moulder and spindle, tenoning, mortising and CNC work all contribute, but sanding on the wide-belt and with hand-held sanders produces the highest exposures and the finest particles. Wood dust is IARC Group 1, causing sinonasal cancer with the strongest evidence for hardwoods, which is why hardwood-heavy joinery carries more health liability than a softwood frame plant. The exposure limit is 1 mg/m3 for hardwood and 2 mg/m3 for softwood as an 8-hour inhalable average, and mixed species are assessed against the hardwood figure.
The second health story is sensitisation. Western Red Cedar contains plicatic acid, a respiratory sensitiser, and a joiner who develops cedar asthma may react to very small exposures afterwards. Wood dust generally is a respiratory and skin sensitiser, causing asthma, rhinitis and dermatitis. Finishing adds solvent vapour, isocyanates from two-pack coatings and PU wood adhesives, preservative and primer treatment, and formaldehyde from urea- and melamine-formaldehyde resin glues.
What distinguishes this trade from panel manufacture is the machinery. Open-cutter spindle moulders, surface planers and thicknessers, saw benches and multi-rip saws are fed by hand, often with short or curved stock, and the amputation risk is concentrated at the cutter rather than hidden inside an automated enclosure.
What a SafeWork NSW visit to a joinery workshop focuses on
Expect the inspector to walk the machine line, and the assessment follows the same route. On the saw bench, the crown guard adjusted to the work for every cut and the riving knife set for the blade in use, with a tested emergency stop and isolator in reach; running the saw with either removed is prohibited. On the multi-rip saw, anti-kickback fingers or curtain across the full infeed width, an enclosed blade housing and tested emergency stops at infeed and outfeed. Fingers missing, tied back or seized is a prohibited practice.
The surface planer needs its bridge guard set to the work and the cutter block guarded behind the fence. Optimising and crosscut saws need interlocked blade enclosures with a light curtain or hood, and mitre and radial arm saws a free-running self-closing lower guard.
After the plant, the assessment asks whether extraction is tested and maintained, how the shop is cleaned, whether dust exposure has been measured, and whether health monitoring and symptom reporting are in place, particularly for anyone working Western Red Cedar.
What a joinery's first pass through the calculator usually shows
Most joiners answer Yes on the saw bench and planer guards, because they have been drilled into the trade. The gaps are elsewhere. The spindle moulder is run for curved work with the cutter exposed above the fence, orbital sanders are used on the bench without extraction, and the machines are blown down with compressed air at knock-off. Long lengths are carried to the saw by two people because there are no roller stands, and nobody has sampled hardwood dust or asked the cedar workers about wheeze or a runny nose.
The controls that move a result from yellow to green are the physical ones. Outfeed tables, roller stands and conveyors that take the weight of long stock, so nobody walks a stair string across the shop on a shoulder, and a vacuum or mechanical lifter for the heaviest components. Racks and cantilever arms rated for the load with end stops and limits displayed. On the multi-rip, an enclosed housing and guarded infeed so hands cannot reach the blades.
NOT RATED looks like this in a busy joinery. The anti-kickback fingers on the multi-rip saw keep catching on a batch of rough-sawn hardwood, so they are tied up out of the way for the rest of the run, with the operator standing in line with the infeed. That is a prohibited practice, so the hazard shows as NOT RATED until the fingers are back and free-moving.
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.
- ✓Joinery shops, stair and window makers and architectural woodworkers
- ✓Businesses running bespoke joiners, stair builders, and shops that need health surveillance for cedar asthma
- ✓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)
- §Managing risks of plant in the workplace — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
- §Managing risks of hazardous chemicals in the workplace — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
- §Managing the work environment and facilities — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
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).
Download it, score it online, sign it.
Read the hazard register, walk the workshop with the calculator open, and download the finished .docx report 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 business 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.