WESTMONT, Ill. — What does a press company do when they sit atop the largest and oldest newspaper press install base in the United States?

They reacquaint themselves with their customers, and Goss International is doing just that with its press control upgrade program. The company is modernizing and removing obsolete controls on its double-wide presses.

Jim Jones, director of operations, 
Gannett Springfield Offset.
Photo courtesy of Gannett Springfield Offset

Goss recently sold and installed a retrofit digital inker and press control upgrade package at the Gannett Springfield Offset production plant in Springfield, Va.

The Springfield Offset plant produces over 60 various publications, including USA Today, The New York Times and numerous commercial printing work on three different Goss presses. The facility has the first installed Goss Colorliner press, one Metroliner press and two Metro offset presses.

Jim Jones, director of operations at Springfield Offset, stated, “With all the various print work we do at this facility we have many press starts and stops, which creates a high volume of newsprint and ink waste. We needed to replace and upgrade our obsolete Goss/Allen-Bradley control systems.

“The Colorliner press was installed back in 1988 with the original Allen Bradley Digital Equipment Corporation microVAX software. It was very obvious that the old Allen-Bradley VAX-based software was outdated and it was becoming a real support problem. We basically had two primary issues. One was the need to replace the outdated press controls on the Colorliner and the other was that we needed to install digital inkers and press controls on all of the other presses to bring us up to current digital technology.”

Gannett replaced the Allen Bradley controls on the Colorliner with the Goss Advanced Press Controls Systems (APCS2), which is a Microsoft Windows-based PC computer console. The Metro presses received the Modular Press Control System (MPCS3), which is the control system for all other Goss double-width presses.

“The digital inkers and press controls were installed in conjunction with the installation of an entire new prepress workflow. This gave us a totally automated digital workflow. We installed all three of these systems this year and they are all working very well,” Jones said.

Installation of new controls

The controls were installed in stages.

“Goss personnel actually came out and did all the wiring prior to the changeover date. It was simply a change of consoles,” Jones said. “The entire changeover of controls went very smoothly and it was done in one day actually between publication runs. The console changeover itself was done in a matter of hours. The systems were running parallel and we tested the systems running parallel to make sure everything was OK and then we just cut over in between publications.

“Overall, the functionality with the new digital controls has automated our production process while dramatically reducing newsprint and ink waste and the support issue is no longer a problem.

“As far as the new functionality of the system, the biggest benefit issue would be the communications that you have in conjunction with your prepress workflow. We are now able to monitor ink preset data from the imaged digital file or the film and compare that with the final settings on press to evaluate our performance and how accurate our preset functions are to lower newsprint and ink waste.”

Springfield Offset’s prepress department now is totally automated using the ProImage workflow solution.

“The workflow solutions allows us to be fully paginated and we do furniture building as far as placing vision marks and other page specialty data on the digital file (page) and reading the file (page) for the ink presets,” Jones said. “We went with OneVision as far as preflight software and now everything is automated.”

Commenting on the Springfield Offset control upgrade, Richard Sutis, president of Goss International stated, “There was no need to change any of the unit hardware — it was simply a change of consoles — we didn’t have to disturb the unit hardware. From an installation standpoint it was Goss components to Goss components. We have the intellectual properties on all the press components. The new PC-based systems are more reliable, easier to service and manage, and can be integrated with computer-to-plate systems and raster image processing interfaces. Goss has and will continue to support our PCS, MPCS, APCS and Meridian controls systems for all its double-width presses in the USA.”

The support and development groups for Goss controls are located in Westmont, Ill. The company has had an electronic controls development group since the 1970s.