Wet weather has delayed the construction work on the building but now with the exterior taking shape the next stage of organising the fitting out is well underway.

 It is expected the facility will be ready for use by April.

It has been a tough time for the mine servicing industry with all the major mining companies cutting back on all but their most essential expenditures.

And, according to Heldweld’s marketing manager Sandy Thomas the closed wallet approach is found across the mining world.

“Whether it is in Australia, or overseas, mining companies are spending nothing at present, so we have had to look to diversify to enable us to survive financially and keep employing our well trained staff,” she told The Argus.

To highlight how tough it has become in the last 24 months, Ms Thomas said revenue has dropped to 2005 levels.

In 2005 we had 52 employees whereas last year we had 80 people working for the group, she said.

Sadly given the drop in revenue the company has had to make some difficult decisions and make some positions redundant when we failed to gain unanimous support for our suggestion to cut everyone’s hours from 38 to 30 hours a week, she said.

“Hedweld remains optimistic about our diversifications into agribusiness and advanced manufacturing. This strategy has already created a new position of Business Development Manager - Advanced Manufacturing and will result in upskilling some of our staff on the new equipment in the coming months,” she said.

“Our agricultural products in particular our fencing range including the floating flood fence posts  are creating a lot of interest in the market place and we remain very positive about their future.”

Recently members of the Hedweld Group attended a ‘rail link’ forum in Newcastle where interested parties could hear more about the opportunities for local businesses in supplying products for the new light rail to be built in Newcastle, and the Wickham interchange project.

We think our company could well find opportunities from that major Newcastle project, Ms Thomas said.

Assisting the company build the new Mount Thorley facility was a $2m grant from the Commonwealth Government’s Manufacturing Transition Program. 

Some technologies Hedweld are investing in including those from Japan and New Zealand will be not only firsts in Australia but firsts in the world. 

Robotic technology will be used to process structural steel and plate and steel metal processing to create new products.

One of the new pieces of equipment coming to the site is a 30-tonne type of filing cabinet or cassette deck that is capable of holding 130t of steel.

This means a certain piece of steel is automatically selected from the giant filing cabinet for processing.