A little more than one year after announcing plans to boost production capacity, Detroit Newspapers’ 190,000-square-foot expansion of its Sterling Heights, Mich., printing facility is motoring along.

The $177 million project, which includes a new press hall and postpress area, will centralize production of Gannett Co. Inc.’s The Detroit News and Knight Ridder’s Detroit Free Press, which publish under a joint operating agreement. The project is expected to be complete in 2005.

With the new ASRS visible in the background, caisson drilling begins for the new press hall. Photo: Robert McClain

The first phase of the project involved the construction of a 110-foot-tall automated storage and retrieval system facility built by Siemens Dematic.

Due to material flow considerations and site limitations, Detroit Newspapers’ former ASRS building was demolished to make room for the new press hall that will house six MAN Roland Inc. GeoMAN 75 offset presses, each capable of producing up to 75,000 copies per hour.

The presses can pump out 80 pages of broadsheet running in straight mode with 40 pages of four-color, sprinkled across as many as seven separate sections.

Siemens is in the final stages of testing and commissioning the ASRS, which combines multiple pieces of equipment and control system technologies, into one automated and integrated system.

Greater flexibility

The new ASRS has two aisles, four rows, 14 tiers and 36 bays, for a total of 4,032 storage positions. Each storage position can hold up to 3,000 pounds. It is the tallest structure in the city of Sterling Heights, a suburb in the heart of the newspapers’ circulation area roughly 20 miles north of Detroit.

Once the facility is completed this month, both newsprint rolls and pallets of preprinted inserts will be stored. The materials will be automatically sent to the ASRS using a fleet of AGVs.

Two huge robotic cranes inside the ASRS will store and retrieve materials. Once the cranes take materials out of the ASRS, eight AGVs will automatically transport skids of inserts to the correct delivery stand in the newspapers’ postpress building.

Siemens will also provide three newsprint preparation stations and a 600-position buffer rack newsprint roll storage system in the reel room that will automatically feed rolls to the presses.

Two lines

Meantime, construction of the 465-foot long press hall and expansion of the existing postpress building began in early August and is scheduled to be completed by January 2005.

The press hall will feature two parallel press lines, each with three presses.

The entire system will encompass 300 printing couples, 60 reelstands and six folders.

The middle section of the building will house a floor for the quiet room to operate the presses, a floor entirely for computer-to-plate equipment, a press motor control floor, and a floor for HVAC equipment.

More than 132 concrete caissons, needed to support the new presses, are currently being built. The concrete table-top press foundation will be poured in six separate sections, with the first two pours set to begin in October. Installation of the presses is scheduled to begin in July 2004.

Postpress progress

Work on the first section of expansion of the existing postpress building will also begin in October. Once completed, the new postpress building will house five expanded Heidelberg inserters with online inserting, press gripper-conveyor lines from GMA, automatic cart loaders from Cannon Equipment Co. and a waste conveyor and stackers from Quipp Inc.

Detroit Newspapers tapped McClier to design the expansion. Skanska USA is the general contractor.