NEWPORT, South Wales - Newsquest Media Group is pumping up its color and commercial printing capability with a tower from Printing Press Services International.

Gannett Co. Inc. unit Newsquest last month was expected to commission the Model 80 shaftless tower to bring more color and revenue into its printing operation, according to Leighton Jones, regional technical services manager for Newsquest Wales & Western.

Leighton Jones, regional technical services manager, Newsquest Wales & Western.
Photo: Newspapers & Technology

The South Wales production plant prints 24 titles - all weeklies except for the South Wales Argus (daily, 50,000). It’s one of 12 production plants owned by Newsquest, the U.K.’s second largest newspaper group with 17 dailies and 300 weeklies.

“We looked forward to more color as we’ve had to turn away advertising to our competitors for lack of color,” Jones said, adding that the machine will also allow the plant to eliminate jobbing out projects to commercial printers.

Newsquest attached the 80,000-copy-per-hour tower on an open footprint to one of its two Goss Visa presses, in the process allowing the publisher to produce up to 24 broadsheet and 48 pages of color. That’s a substantial boost from the eight color pages each Visa press could produce, Jones said.

Stainless steel foundation

Now that the tower is installed, a task that took one day, PPSI will recondition the shafted Visa machines, adding PPSI digital inkers, dampeners and an upgraded Rockwell Automation controls desk. That project will be completed later this year, Jones said.

	Tower installed at Newsquest is similar to the seven units PPSI will place at The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee. Photo: Newspapers & Technology
	The PPSI tower seals itself off to permit more efficient clean-up.

“The PPSI tower installation was right on time with no loss of production,” Jones said. “We took the roof off the building and dropped the unit in.”

PPSI had prestaged and prewired the tower before shipping it to South Wales.

The tower sports 410 grade stainless steel cylinders, a 2:5:5 jaw folder and narrow-gap lockups, said Stephen McManamon, PPSI’s managing director.

McManamon said PPSI uses steel from the Czech Republic to manufacture the cylinders, machining them at the vendor’s Preston, England, facilities.  

“It’s three times the price of carbon steel, but accurate and quiet,” he said of the stainless steel cylinders.

The metal is also used by PPSI to make internal unit components such as ink trains, sockets and other parts that might be contaminated by ink.

To ensure precise registration, the tower is equipped with an automatic registration system from Q.I. Press Controls while Oxy-Dry supplied the automatic blanket washing system. The press also has spraybar dampeners from Baldwin Technology Co. Inc., drives from Siemens and bearings from SKF Group.

Either coldset or UV

Jones said Newsquest plans to exploit the tower’s two-channel digital ink rail to attract additional commercial jobs. The patented rail lets newspapers use two different types of inks - coldset and UV - at the same time, thus allowing them to change over with minimal delay, McManamon said.

Crews removed the roof and slipped the PPSI tower in, meshing it with a Goss Visa press.

A built-in automatic washing system, meantime, eliminates lengthy and manual clean-up.

The Newsquest tower is one of more than 200 shaftless units and 2,700 digital inkers PPSI has sold in the past three years, McManamon said.

“The add-on tower business and retrofitting digital inkers on various presses has been a growing business for us,” he said. “Our rebuild business has also been on the rise as newspapers try to get more productivity out of their existing presses.”

To that end, Newsquest also ordered digital inkers for presses producing the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. It also hired PPSI to rebuild four folding couples and to upgrade angle bars and RTFs at its Lancashire facility.

Flange-mounted controls let operators make changes as the tower operates.

In addition to Newsquest, PPSI has also installed towers at the (New York) Daily News and the (Montreal) Gazette. The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, meantime, is adding seven Model 80 compact towers as well as 120 single-channel digital ink rails.

Oxford press upgrade

South Wales was not the only Newsquest plant to upgrade its operations. In late 2004, the publisher bolstered its Oxford print facility by commissioning a GeoMAN 75 press from MAN Roland. The shaftless machine, configured as six towers and two 2:5:5 jaw folders, replaced an obsolete 34-year-old press.

The press is equipped with MAN Roland’s Pecom controls and meshes with an Aurosys roll handling system, said Steve Long, group print director at Newsquest.

 “We were very pleased with the MAN Roland installation,” he said, adding that the press was installed two months before its deadline.

Like South Wales, Newsquest is using the MAN Roland press to woo commercial accounts and to produce newspapers such as the rival Daily Telegraph, which it began printing last summer.