By Lisa Larson
Managing Editor

Although there are several companies that sell rebuilt presses and will rebuild existing units on or off site, the Houston Chronicle has undertaken a four-year press rebuild and installation project, most of which it is doing itself using its own machinists and machine shop.

“We have an excellent machine shop that we started a long time ago. We do our own folder rebuilds and we do unit rebuilds,” said Jack Stanley, senior vice president of operations and technology at the Houston Chronicle. “In fact, at this point we’ve probably rebuilt as many units as some of the professionals have. We take [the units] completely apart, lay them all out, replace cylinders, replace all the bearings, re-drill them, rebuild the ink trains and then put them back in.”

"Frankenpress"

The Houston Chronicle (daily, 551,854; Sunday, 744,884) originally started out as a letterpress operation, and still runs the five letterpresses at its downtown facility today. The Chronicle placed a Goss Metro offset press alongside the letterpresses in 1983. Then the Chronicle acquired its Southwest printing facility and the five Metro presses it houses from the Houston Post when Dean Singleton closed the paper in 1995. The Chronicle is also now rebuilding and installing 20 additional Metro units that were configured into three presslines at the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. MAN Roland, which is installing the new presses at O Globo, brokered the press tradeout deal.

“This one truly is a ‘Frankenpress.’ It’s got pieces from six different locations,” Stanley said.

While the Chronicle has the machine shop, the people, the tools and the skills to do most of the work required to rebuild the press units, it does work with George R. Hall Contracting on the moving, rigging and heavy assembly of the presses. Hall Contracting traveled to Rio and spent nine months taking the O Globo presses apart, packaging them up, putting them on a boat, and getting them through customs and delivered to Houston.

The Chronicle started the rebuilding project with the five Metros it inherited from the Houston Post. Some of the press units are trucked to the machine shop in an old plant across town for rebuilding, but much of the refurbishing of the five Metros from the Post was done with the units in place.

The Chronicle also ran the 20-unit O Globo press through the refurb facility, upgrading the two eight-unit presses to make them tens, and doing more refurbishing work on the two presses that were already tens.

“Hall has done an excellent job for us,” Stanley said. “We have considered using them for the rebuilding, and they do an excellent job, but we’ve been on a program now for a number of years in which I wanted to make sure that we maintained our skills in terms of being able to rebuild folders and the refurbishing of the units,” Stanley said. “There’s just no way we could ship [press units] off someplace. We had to learn how to [rebuild] them in place. Once we had that done, then [rebuilding] the ones from O Globo was sort of a non-event.”

At the beginning of this year, the Chronicle shut down the offset press at the downtown plant, took it apart and refurbished it as well, taking pieces of the O Globo press and that press to create the “Frankenpress.”

“We managed to take a plant that needed a lot of work and we’ve brought it up to specs that we want to be able to print with and we’ve now been able to add capability to it and get a paper out,” Stanley said. “We deliberately planned this as a … four-year install, and with the economy right now, we may stretch that a little bit … We’ll just have to see how the rest of this year works out.

“We’ve got two more years to go to get it done. When we’re finally done, we’ll have a pretty good pressroom,” Stanley concluded.
 

George R. Hall Contracting
440.933.4100