By Lisa Larson
Managing Editor
In today’s economic climate, it
stands to reason that newspapers are looking for ways to maximize the value of
existing press equipment rather than buying new.
There is no more economical way to
increase the color and page count capacity of existing presslines than by adding
four-high towers. A handful of newspapers have already completed the addition of
one or two towers to their existing presslines, and several more tower add-ons
are scheduled for completion soon.
Printing Press Services
International is currently completing a tower addition at The Montreal Gazette
and beginning one at the New York Daily News.
The Gazette, a Hollinger Inc.
publication, is moving away from letterpress and into a new printing plant where
two reconditioned Goss Metro presses are being installed. The Gazette (Monday
– Saturday, 184,339; Sunday, 134,232) is adding two 4/4 PPSI towers to each
press. PPSI purchased the two presses from Aftenposten in Oslo, Norway and
reconditioned them. The presses have 22 units each, including the new towers.
“This was a very good option for
us. Because of the number of units that were available, we stacked them up to
give us 4/1 leads,” said John Laurin, vice president of manufacturing for The
Montreal Gazette. “We bought the two 4/4 color towers and now we’ve got a
press that’s got probably the second-most color of any press in Canada.”
The new towers were installed
during the mechanical installation of the reconditioned Metro presses, allowing
The Gazette to easily place the towers inside the presses right behind the
folder. The Gazette is printing full time on the first press, which was brought
online in May 2001, and is in the process of bringing the second press online.
The Gazette expected to have the second press online by the end of March, at
which time it would move the rest of the daily production into the new plant.
“The towers themselves are good,
quality equipment. They produce as good a print job for newspaper offset as any
machine I’ve seen,” Laurin said. “Their inking system is as good as any I’ve
seen. It works well … and it does a good printing job.”
The New York Daily News (Monday –
Friday, 734,473; Saturday, 571,290; Sunday, 802,215) last month took shipment of
the first of nine shaftless M-80 towers from PPSI in Preston, England. The Daily
News will add one tower to each of its nine shafted Goss Newsliner presslines
during the next year.
Michael Mahfouz (left), senior director
of
engineering and maintenance at the New York
Daily News, supervises the delivery of the
first PPSI tower last month.
Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News
The Daily News took a more reserved
approach, choosing to add a 2/2 spot color tower that prints only on the A and C
levels to each press. The towers have the side frames on the B level, which
could be added to in the future if the newspaper decides to expand the towers to
four-color.
“This gives us spot color, but we’ve
also got a pretty good groundwork laid for a full tower if that’s the
direction that we decide to go,” said Michael Mahfouz, senior director of
engineering and maintenance at the New York Daily News. “We could have gotten
a mono, but we got the A and C levels so we have the spot color, with the plan
being that if we decide we want to expand to a full-color tower, we’re more
than halfway there.”
The New York Daily News is adding a shaftless
PPSI M-80 tower to each of its nine shafted Goss Newsliner presses. Here, one
level of the first tower, delivered last month, is being put into the plant. The
doorway already existed, but the permanent cement dock was built to accommodate
delivery of the towers.
Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News
The new towers will be stacked into
the sixth position on the nine six-unit presses. Each press is already equipped
with six reelstands, although the sixth one currently doesn’t have a unit
above it. The sixth web is used to split a tower on Fridays, when the edition
required more color and had a higher page count.
“With five units, including one
color tower, we run collect most of the time [up to] 160 pages. The problem is,
typically on our Friday edition we run more than 160 pages. When we take that
sixth web and wind up splitting the tower, there goes color,” Mahfouz said.
“The company wanted to be able to run color in all editions seven days a week.
We had the sixth web, but we didn’t have the unit to run it through, and now
we will.”
As part of the project, the New
York Daily News is replacing all the Goss Meridian press controls, which are
responsible for “a tremendous amount of downtime,” with new press controls
from ABB Inc. ABB is providing new unit controls, press controls and consoles
for the existing presses, as well as new press controls and shaftless drive
controls for the new PPSI towers. Masthead International Inc. is doing the
mechanical installation of the press towers for PPSI, as well as the electrical
installation for both PPSI and ABB.
Another advantage of the new towers
is that they are also equipped with Ryco spraybars. The Daily News already had
replaced the spraybars on its Goss presses with Ryco spraybars when it did its
own web-width reduction last year.
Austin splits KBA towers between two presses
The Austin (Texas)
American-Statesman (daily, 183,873; Sunday, 2338,624) is wrapping up its
installation of two Colora towers from KBA North America Inc. The 4/4 towers can
be run into one of the newspaper’s three Goss Metro presslines or into a
Colora pressline, which was commissioned last year to help with printing of the
New York Times.
“We chose to buy a new press as
opposed to adding onto our three existing Goss Metros … at the request of the
New York Times, to meet their paging and color capacity needs, and to help some
of our own production needs,” said Bob Tucker, vice president of operations at
the Austin American-Statesman. “The towers can run into the KBA press, but we
specifically bought them to also run into one of our Goss presses.”
The American-Statesman was
originally going to add two towers to each of its Goss presses, but because of
the sluggish economy and the magnitude of the project, it chose last year to
scale back its plans. Installation of the two Colora towers began last October.
The newspaper is currently testing the towers and expects them to be online this
month.
KBA is also adding a tower to a
Comet press at an East African newspaper group (see related story, page 46.)
TKS an early leader
TKS (USA) Inc. was one of the first
to add a tower to an existing competitor’s press when it stacked a mono unit
onto a Goss Metro at Newsday back in the 1980s. The success of that installation
helped the company secure its next tower add-on project at The Spokesman-Review
in Spokane, Wash.
One of the two TKS ColorTop 6000 towers
that were added to a Goss Metro at
The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.
Photo courtesy of TKS
The Spokesman-Review (Monday –
Friday, 105,911; Saturday, 123,053; Sunday, 137,500) in 1995 added two TKS
ColorTop 6000 towers to its 12-unit Goss Metro, which was originally installed
in 1981. The towers were added — one on either end of the press — to provide
more color capacity for both advertising and the newsroom.
“The square footage on both ends
of the press … was planned for expansion when the building [was constructed]
in 1981. We left room on each end for three additional units for expansion,”
said Paul Schafer, production manager at The Spokesman-Review. “In 1981,
towers hadn’t been invented yet, so we wound up using the space for a tower on
either end, and we still have room for one more tower on either end if we ever
needed it.”
Along with the tower add-on, the
newspaper also replaced all of the mechanical ink pumps on the press to TKS
digital page packs so that the digital ink pumps on the new towers would match
all the way along the line with the Goss units. The Spokesman-Review also bought
two reel tension pasters from TKS, as well as two T-NPC press control consoles,
which the company has since stopped selling. Also as part of the project, The
Spokesman-Review installed plate benders from K&F International and changed
its press lockups to a K&F lockup.
“We’re very happy with our
decision — we were at the time and we have been ever since. It’s good
equipment … They have been running well from the first day,” Schafer said.
“If we had to get another tower again we’d go to TKS first.”
TKS last year installed two
ColorTop 7000 towers — the shaftless version of the TKS tower — to a shafted
TKS press at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and completed a large tower
addition project in conjunction with Goss for Dow Jones & Co. (see related
story, page 22).
Goss adds to add-on tally
Goss can also point to several of
its own tower addition projects in the United States, and most recently
announced several add-on projects in Europe (see related story, page 45).
In 2000, Goss installed a new
Metrocolor tower on the end of a six-unit Headliner Offset press at the Durham
(N.C.) Herald Sun, which is owned by The Durham Herald Co., nearly doubling the
paper’s color capacity.
The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
(daily, 65,954; Sunday, 79,385), expects to complete the installation of two
four-high Universal 70 towers and one commercial folder from Goss this month.
The project began in May 2001.
The towers are in-line with the
newspaper’s existing nine-unit Goss Universal 70 press. The Gazette now will
have 11 towers with three commercial folders and one double-width newspaper
folder.
The Gazette prints the Sunday
comics for more than 130 other newspapers, as well as community college class
schedules, the University of Iowa’s student newspaper and other newspaper
insert printing. With the addition of the new towers and folder, the publisher
aims to expand its commercial printing work.
Although Goss’ bankruptcy filing
prolonged the installation somewhat, The Gazette is very pleased with the
project overall.
“It was a beautiful mechanical
installation — just really solid,” said Peg Schmitz, vice president of print
operations at The Gazette. “Goss did a really good job on this particular
installation. They had to deal with their bankruptcy in the middle of it … so
that lengthened the installation quite a bit, but the Goss employees were great
to work with throughout the whole process.”
