Load bearing capability is critical in the safety performance of products like scaffolding, trench supports, industrial racking, barriers and elevated walkways, which are all required to comply with stringent Australian Standards.

Azuma Design has been kept increasingly busy over the past year testing a diverse range of load-bearing products for compliance with the Standard, an area critical for worker safety.

“As soon as you put workers into a situation where they are elevated off the ground or working in or under the ground, the opportunity for injury greatly increases,” says Azuma director of design Mike Alchin.

“You cannot afford to have load failures in things like scaffolding or trench supports, so the Standard is stringent for good reason; we’ve seen a sharp increase in testing products in this field against the Standard over the past 12 months.

“Mechanical engineering is at the heart of the testing regimes at Azuma Design, it enables us to design and build test equipment to measure the capability and compliance of virtually any product.”

Azuma Design has two extensively-equipped NATA (a globally-recognised testing accreditation)-accredited test laboratories, in Sydney and Perth.

“Fundamentally with this type of product we’re either direct loading weight onto it or using hydraulic rams to create pressure, and measuring its deflection or failure point with load cells.

“Measuring against the Standard is pretty straight forward, though we are constantly surprised and disturbed by the number of failures we see.”

Take ladders, for example.

Azuma recently tested a range of major brand ladders, all imported from different suppliers, and all supposedly compliant with the Australian Standard. They all failed.

“Scarily, every single ladder failed during testing, and all well short of the Standard required by our laws,” Mike explains.

“It was certainly a surprise and made everyone involved think harder about product quality and safety the ramifications of a failure in this type of product don’t bare thinking about.”

The relevant Standards were: AS1657 Fixed platforms, walkways, stairways & ladders, AS4687 Temporary Fencing, ASNZS1170-1 Structural Design Actions and AS/NZS1892.1,.2,.3 Performance & Dimensional Tests on portable ladders.