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Elite team of skilled tradesmen buck national trend for Australian manufacturer

 In a globally competitive world where imported goods have outperformed Australian manufactured products there exists a tiny team of elite and highly skilled tradesmen who not only maintain sheds full of machinery, but actually build them from the ground up.
Wagners Composite Fibre Technologies (CFT) is located in the western Queensland town of Wellcamp, just outside of Toowoomba and started manufacturing Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) structural profiles for civil engineering projects some 20-years ago.
At the time you couldn’t just go to a Chinese factory and purchase the machinery required to manufacture the modern building material, and Wagners CFT had an idea about how they could implement a unique pull-winding technique to make their pultruded FRP one of the strongest in the world; so they had to build the machinery required to manufacture their FRP profiles from scratch…and it’s a tradition that is still alive and well at Wagners CFT today bucking the national trend to off-shore or buy off the shelf.
Earlier this year, Wagners CFT launched its new 356mm Utility Pole for network operators around the globe struggling with rising costs, declining quality and reliability of supply for traditional timber utility poles.  But what most people don’t know according to Wagners CFT Fitter & Turner Warren Smith is that the journey to the first commercially produced 356mm Wagners’ FRP Utility Pole started some five years earlier with the building of Pultrusion Machine 6 (P6).
“P6 was drawn some 5 years ago and 80% of the machine had to be designed and fabricated internally with our engineers,” Warren Smith said.
“You don’t see that a lot in the manufacturing that is still left in Australia; normally someone would ring up a foreign machine manufacturing company and say I want a piece of machinery that can do this job and it’d cost you $X-million dollars.  Our machines at Wagners CFT are just not bought off the shelf.”
“We are the only people in the world that are making our product in the fashion that we are making it and we’ve used the skills and expertise of around 20-different skill sets from staff both current and past to make that happen,” Mr Smith said.
“Boiler makers, millers and machinists, laser cutters, water jet operators and electricians, software people to build the electronics, hydraulics technicians, automation experts, cabinet makers, designers, certifiers, project managers, fitter and turners…the list goes on; and when we needed a skillset that we didn’t have in house we would look to the local Toowoomba community first and then further afield within Australia to get what we needed.”
“Bolting a machine down to the ground is not the same as carefully placing each component in position with high focus on accuracy and alignment right down to the millimeter.  And if everything is done right, we should be able to shoot a bullet up the centre of the machine like a gun barrel and not hit anything; and it’s that kind of accuracy in the machinery that gives us 100% accuracy in Wagners CFT products.”

Pictured – Wagners CFT skilled tradesmen bringing the new P6 machine online

Engineer, James Bourke agrees and said because the machines are custom built for a purpose, for example to pultrude a 356mm profile, they are also more robust.

“Unlike most businesses that would build machinery like this, we are not building it to on-sell and make a profit from.  We are building the machine for a specific purpose and need, which means they are more robust, more reliable, so we get better consistency of supply; and it’s Wagners’ own IP which we know from the inside out,” James Bourke said.

“P6 has a pulling capacity of 50-tonnes and the bigger the capacity the bigger the profile you can run.”

“Currently we are running P6 at 30-tonne pulling capacity and it’s really just being run in because with machines like this you can’t run them at full capacity all the time, you need a little up your sleeve and that is where you get your efficiency from because the machine is running comfortably,” Mr Bourke said.

“And we’ve got it set up specifically for the profile which means you can’t take out one piece and put it on another machine, the heaters and mandrel are all specific to a profile that you are running.”

 

Pictured-Preparing the mandrel for installation on P6

There are 25+ operators across 4 shifts plus a handful of specialists from local businesses to man all six pultrusion machines at Wagners CFT.

“P1 to P6 are manufacturing a variety of profiles from cross arms for electricity networks, through to 100×100 SHS and 250×100 RHS, light poles and then right up to the new 356mm utility pole, manned by shifts of operators on a 24 hour roster,” James Bourke said.

“They’re a really versatile team of people from an eclectic background of manufacturing including agriculture, food industries, earthmoving, engineering and the gas industry,” Mr Bourke said.

“Then we’ve got a further 5 tradesmen and 3 apprentices all fitters and turners and boiler makers as well as 2 electricians and an apprentice supporting the operators and ensuring the machines are running efficiently and effectively.”

“To have apprentices on board and teach them our trade is a very important thing to me because we have a generation of people now that have no idea about the importance of our trade and because of the lack of opportunities in manufacturing in Australia we are definitely at risk of losing those skills and knowledge that allows the team at Wagners to do what they do.”

“Having the skill set to adjust and refine the machinery as needed and required and always looking at ways to improve our productivity and product through further machinery adjustments means that Wagners CFT is producing the best FRP products available to the market in Australia and we are doing it on machinery that is has been designed, manufactured and built in Australia – I don’t think you’d get anymore Australian made than that.”

If you are interested in pursuing a trade with Wagners CFT visit https://www.wagner.com.au/main/careers/

For more information on Wagners CFT’s new 356mm Utility Pole visit https://resources.wagnerscft.com.au/new-utility-pole-provides-solution-to-timber-crisis-for-electricity-networks

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