Metal Mates

About Us

Your Real Mates Since 1997

Metal Mates has been doing one thing since 1997: making sure Newcastle and the Hunter Region can get their hands on quality steel and metal products without the runaround. We're locally owned, locally operated, and locally invested, this isn't a call centre with a warehouse attached, it's a Cessnock business that's watched the region grow and grown right alongside it.

Your real mates are your Metal Mates. It's been our line for a long time because it's true, we'd rather earn a customer for the next twenty years than make a quick sale today.

Our Story

Metal Mates opened in Cessnock in 1997, and back then it looked a lot simpler than it does today, a local steel yard serving builders and fabricators who needed decent product without driving to Newcastle for it. Being locally owned meant we could make decisions the way a neighbour would: say yes when someone needed a delivery run same-day, honour a credit note that had sat on the books for months, hold stock for a regular even when it was tight.

Nearly three decades on, the same instinct has just been put to work at a bigger scale. What started with steel bars and RHS grew into fencing, reinforcing, aluminium, gas and welding supplies, custom sheds and carports, because customers kept asking whether we stocked something, and often enough the answer became yes. We've grown from a Cessnock supplier into a business that delivers across the Hunter, the Central Coast, the Mid North Coast and beyond, without ever moving the yard from where it started.

It's also a story about the people who've stuck around. We've had team members spend ten years or more behind the counter or on the trucks, long enough to know half of Cessnock's tradies by name, long enough to remember which customers like a call before the delivery truck rocks up. That kind of tenure isn't an accident; it's what happens when a business treats its own crew the way it wants its crew to treat customers.

We're still locally owned and operated today, still growing, and still running on the same idea we started with in 1997: your real mates are your Metal Mates.

What We Stock

Plus the Services to Match.

Who We Help

• Homeowners knocking up a garden fence.
• Tradies who need RHS cut to size on a Tuesday morning.
• Builders and fabricators who've been ordering from us for twenty years.
• Farmers after cattle panels and rural fencing.
• Mining, civil and government contractors who need steel that won't let a project down.

Residential, commercial, rural, industrial, if it's steel or metal, we've probably supplied it for someone doing exactly what you're doing.

Our Community

We've always measured this business by relationships, not invoices. Some of our customers have been ordering from us since we opened the doors in 1997. Tradies who ring us before anyone else, builders we've watched grow their own businesses over the years, farmers we've supplied through drought and flood alike. Our staff and our customers are our real strength, and we treat the Cessnock and Hunter community as partners, not just postcodes on a delivery run. Success here has never come from being the biggest or the loudest supplier in the region, it's come from the relationships we've forged and the people behind them, who remain our greatest asset.

The Team You'll Actually Talk To

Ask around Cessnock and you'll hear the same thing customers keep telling us: our crew are the reason people keep coming back. We're not interested in telling you we "can't help", if we don't have it, we'll find it, order it, or point you to someone who can sort you out. That's not a slogan, it's just how Shayne, Grant and the rest of the Metal Mates crew have always run the place.