Plant Services Workshop

The plant services workshop at Kandos Cement Works is the maintenance workshop that served the plant's fitters and welders, a steel-framed bay with workbenches along the walls and overhead crane gantries running the length of the room. The benches are timber-topped on heavy steel underframes, scarred from decades of clamping, drilling, and grinding. Vices are mounted at intervals along the benches. A drill press, a pedestal grinder, and a lathe stand on the floor between the bays. Toolboards on the walls behind each station carry the outlines of the tools they once held, drawn in heavy black ink. The overhead crane has been parked at one end of the gantry. The roller door at the far end of the workshop is partly raised.

A cement plant of this scale could not contract out the bulk of its maintenance, and the workshop at Kandos handled fabrication, mechanical repair, and welding work in-house across the operational life of the plant. Bearings were pulled, shafts re-machined, replacement parts welded up, and items returned to the lines they served. The workshop was the everyday home of the fitters and welders among the 98-strong workforce that took the plant through to its closure. Kandos Cement Works closed in September 2011. The benches and the heavier plant in the workshop have stayed in place since, with the smaller tools and the contents of the toolboards removed in the months that followed.