Dayton Flies Into the Future

by Pete Wetmore

At first glance, the Print Technology Center of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News could pass for a small airport.

Dayton’s aviation heritage is evident at the Dayton Daily News Print Technology Center in southwest Ohio. The sweeping curve of the roof over the press line and newsprint-storage area reminds visitors of an airplane wing, while the glass-faced first floor is reminiscent of an airport terminal.

A wing-shaped roof rises high above a terminal-like entrance to the building 19 miles south of the Cox newspaper’s downtown newsroom. From the rear, the highly automated $91 million facility looks like an airplane hangar.

The resemblance to things aeronautical is intentional: Aviation is key to Dayton, home of the pioneering Wright brothers, a host of aeronautical industries and Wright-Patterson Air Force base. In creating its new printing and distribution facility, the Daily News set out to strike a familiar local chord.

I enter through the main door, which overlooks Interstate 75 and the rolling hills of southwestern Ohio, and face two walls of windows. One peers into the paper-storage area, the other affords a view of the press line; both long rows of machinery sit under the winged ceiling, six stories above.

Glass, sunlight and curves are everywhere. Not present is my host, Stan Richmond, vice president of operations and a key player in the four-year process that brought the printing plant fully online at the end of August. Richmond has been delayed by meetings during this hectic pre-Thanksgiving week. Production Director Mike Joseph steps up to begin the tour.

Pioneering Partnerships

The unusual table-top structural design supporting Dayton’s three KBA presses is evident from the west side. Each table top is supported by concrete-reinforced legs; in the future, accommodating new equipment will be easier than with a conventional steel-frame design, as each table top is wide open between the supporting columns.

The project began in 1996, when a team at the paper was given $180,000 to conduct a feasibility study. Six groups of candidates, each including architects, engineers, builders and process-management experts, were asked to present their ideas on how to build a production facility, rather than what it would look like.

Three firms were selected: the then-Blevins Harding Group of Boulder, Colo. (planners); Cleveland-based GSI Inc. (architects and engineers); and Turner Construction Co. of Cincinnati (general contractors). Each agreed to participate in every meeting about the project; team members visited newspapers in France, Norway, Japan and elsewhere to gather ideas and make equipment decisions.

The result was a minimum of change orders as design, construction and implementation moved forward smoothly. Ground was broken in May 1997, equipment installation began in August 1998, and the five-month transition from startup to full production was completed a year later.

As we leave the operations office on the second floor, Joseph points out the "people-friendly" wide hallways and stairs, mezzanines and signs describing the areas behind glass walls–a striking workplace where guests are welcome.

Table-top Printing

Our first stop is the press hall, where three six-unit anilox offset presses from KBA North America Inc. of York, Pa., stand on platforms supported by columns driven five feet into the bedrock. The design, developed in Europe, is called a "table-top structure." Its beauty is in its flexibility–the presses rest on table tops with each level supported by evenly spaced concrete-reinforced legs.

Rolls of newsprint ride a conveyor toward the unusual paper-storage area at the Dayton production facility. Newsprint rolls are stored on their sides—not stacked—in two rows of racks, each 750 rolls long by 10 rolls high. Robots store and retrieve rolls after they have been inventoried and prepared for use.

A yellow robot rides on a single rail to store and retrieve rolls of newsprint in the automated newsprint storage area. The robot can reach nearly six stories high to get reels from the top shelves in the storage area, which parallels the press line in a space-saving design.

Between those legs the newsprint reel racks stand 56.5 inches apart, an interval dictated not by their location relative to the press units, as in traditional steel-frame installations, but to the newsprint-storage area. What’s more, if new equipment must be positioned differently, each table top can be configured as needed. The table top’s construction costs were also lower than those of a traditional configuration, Joseph adds.

We pass under the 56-foot-tall press line and enter the newsprint area. Designed to save space, the 18-foot-wide area holds 1,500 rolls of newsprint in two racks, each holding 75 columns of reels 10 rolls high. Each roll is cradled on its side, not stacked on its end, and is immediately accessible to two laser-guided robots that pluck rolls from shelves and deliver them to the reel racks through 18 doorways leading into the press hall. The benefits are obvious, Richmond explains when he joins us.

"You don’t have to move one roll to get to another," he says.

Hands-Off Production

The AS/RS (automated storage/ retrieval system) stores a wealth of data, including mill date and origin, size, color, and performance. Except for the few minutes each roll is inspected and prepped for storage, human hands never touch newsprint. Only two people are needed to manage the 30-day inventory, from delivery through production.

Richmond and I bid Joseph adieu, then return to the press hall for a closer look at KBA’s fully automated reel machines. En route to the press, each reel feeds paper through two dancer rollers, which move

up and down to compensate for variations in the roll as it unwinds, then to provide proper tension. Better registration results, Richmond says.

We discuss the merits of a planned humidity-control system, then enter what Richmond calls the ink farm. Three 6,700-gallon tanks hold black ink, while three pairs of 2,500-gallon tanks each hold specially developed color inks from US Ink of Carlstadt, N.J.

The tanks, which stand on scales in a recessed area designed to contain spills, are continuously weighed to gauge consumption. Ink is fed through pipes to the presses. No one carries ink here.

As we pass the insert-delivery area, where each pallet is weighed as it arrives to determine how many copies are aboard, Richmond declines to discuss newsprint waste so early in the facility’s life. "You can considerably reduce waste below any shaft press–we’re confident of that," he says. Over its expected 25- to 30-year lifespan, "this building will pay for itself" through production efficiencies, he adds.

We ride an elevator to the second of seven press decks for a closer look at the shaftless and keyless KBA presses, whose 81 couples can produce 40 pages of full color in a 96-page edition. Spot color as a single ink is a thing of the past, Richmond notes; two-color ads take the same path through the presses as four-color ads do.

A view from above the running KBA press shows the yellow construction crane built into the facility. The steel press deck was extended on one side to touch the wall. From the railing at left, the floor is visible almost four stories below.

"Don’t ask me how many motors there are here," he laughs, gesturing to the press line. The AC-powered drives are synchronized in accordance with 350,000 computer readings per revolution.

Richmond opens the cover on one press unit, then describes the tier of rollers within. The bottom one is the anilox cylinder, whose surface is engraved with microscopic indentations, or capillaries. Ink is forced into the capillaries by two blades. The result is even application of ink across the cylinder, Richmond explains. Ink then is carried from the anilox cylinder to the plate by a form roller with identical dimensions as the plate, eliminating ink variations.

Another key feature of the KBA presses is the jaw folder, whose "nice big bite" across the width of the paper ensures a square cut and even fold, Richmond says. The folder also can accommodate a stitcher, he adds, pointing to a small device enabling the Daily News to bind tabloid sections at press speed–70,000 impressions an hour.

Ascending to the top of the press line for a long view of the hall, which is capped by a permanent construction crane, we see the flexibility built into the new building. Along with the table-top foundation, planners left room for a fourth press, and the arching roof provides space to stack additional printing couples atop the existing four-high towers. We descend and walk to one of three press-control desks. From each desk, an operator can monitor an entire run by computer. Software developed by EAE Group of Marietta, Ga., shows such things as how the press has been webbed, while video cameras record close-up views of registration dots as they whiz by. The operator can select one of 22 views of the plant, or focus on a single part within a press.

When three presses are running, the press crew totals four people–three operators and one reel worker. The presses roll at midnight, cranking out three editions a night; circulation ranges from 141,000 early in the week to about 204,000 on Sunday.

Papers snake into the inserter area on the blue conveyor. The inserters can be set up to feed 12 items into each copy of the Dayton Daily News in two lines running simultaneously, or 24 items into each copy in a single pass from one line.

Follow the Blue Line

In the color-coded world of this plant, each press feeds a conveyor of the same color. We follow the blue line into the packaging center, where inserters made by a Dayton-based unit of Heidelberg Web Systems can put as many as 24 items into a single jacket at press speed. "We can insert online," Richmond says. "We’re designed to make complete papers."

Those complete papers are fed to a cart loader from Cannon Equipment of Rosemount, Minn., which fills up to 400 carts in a night. Most are trucked to nine distribution centers for pickup by carriers. One of the centers and single-copy operations are in this facility, so those carts are just wheeled around the corner, their contents broken down by route and papers bagged before being handed off for delivery.

The future of newspaper packaging also sits in this room. Richmond leads me to a series of tall aluminum bins, whose "stream lifter" flippers open to hold a line of papers lying flat. Sold by Heidelberg, the buffering and storage system has multiple uses. If there’s a problem with an inserter, papers can be diverted to the bins, allowing the press run to continue. When the inserter comes back online, the press may resume feeding the inserter line directly, or the stored papers may go first while newer copies are stored.

At left, bundle carts stand ready to receive the day’s papers, which are then trucked to nine distribution centers. The carts are filled by Cannon stackers; a blue one is in the lower left corner of the photo.

But the real potential rests in the bins’ capacity–enough to store an entire Sunday run. Comic sections can be completely stuffed, then stored, then retrieved and distributed, entirely by conveyor and without human intervention.

As we wind up our tour, Richmond points to the blue steel shelves that hold pallets of inserts. One day, he explains, insert printers will load preprints into cassettes that can be fed directly into the conveyor system.

As I leave, the soaring ceiling again reminds me that aviation is in Dayton’s bloodstream, thanks to the Wright brothers–whose own mechanical interests began with the bicycle. I can’t help but think that the Dayton Daily News Print Technology Center puts a new spin on the old cry, "Look, Ma, no hands!"

Pete Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pw@colegroup.com; phone, (217) 367-6521. Photos by Skip Peterson, Dayton Daily News.