There are two big things you need to know about angle bars: Nobody outside the pressroom has the faintest idea what they are, and the guys at the Anchorage Daily News have invented one that's adjustable.
What? You want to know how it works? What It All Means?
Okay, here goes:
1. You've got your web weaving in and out of various rollers on the press, right? Well, sometimes it has to make a jog to get from one part of the press to another, to pick up some color ink or to hit the former properly. This stuff changes daily because certain customers want their ads in color on certain pages.
The angle bar sits across the web at a 45-degree angle, jogging the paper to one side. Another angle bar on the other side of the press jogs it back again to hit the former.
Sounds like something out of Rube Goldberg's notebook, doesn't it?
2. Up in Anchorage, Mike Fuller, pressroom production manager, found himself losing advertising customers to smaller commercial shops that run single-wide presses.
A double-wide press prints four pages at a time on a "wide" (50 or 54 inches in width, usually). Somewhere in the process the web gets slit into two pieces, which the former then folds down the middle to become the newspaper we know and love.
A single-wide press, on the other hand, just runs one smaller web, prints it and folds it. This simplicity allows the single-wide pressroom to do all kinds of sexy things to make the product look different from a broadsheet page. Different means eye-catching, which advertisers (and newsroom people, for that matter) like a great deal.
3. Back to Anchorage: Fuller, still seeing commercial printing dollars wafting out of his pressroom, enlists the aid of Reggie Ball ("genius machinist," says Fuller) and Steve Hopkinson, maintenance foreman.
"They worked together," Fuller says. "Steve knows the press and Reggie knows mechanics and machining."
Three months and a ton of calculations and machining later, and voila!--the adjustable angle bar.
So....The adjustable angle bar lets you change the angle of the web travel, meaning you can now run narrower rolls and still set the web to hit the former exactly in the middle to fold the danged thing.
The bottom line: An editorial product called "8," which is a mere 6 3/4-inches wide by 22 3/4-inches long, a design that was eye-catching enough to win a design award over such national publications as Rolling Stone, Life and Vanity Fair.
And to pay for it all, Fuller's hanging onto the commercial work that would have gone to a single-wide printer.
The cost? "We don't know, it was all in-house. We didn't bring anything in from the outside," Fuller says.
Will all this innovation wind up in future presses? "Goss is going to make it available as a resource for other papers--It's open for anybody who'd like to have it," says Fuller.
Adds Frank Balentine, press manager for NAA, "It's an innovation that's of benefit to the industry--The narrow width gives the advertiser something extra to call attention to his product, and that's a good feature."
And wouldn't Rube be proud!
John Bryan is a regular contributor to TechNews.
Sources
Frank Balentine, NAA, 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Va., 20191. E-mail, balef@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1217; fax, (703) 648-1216.
Mike Fuller, Anchorage Daily News, P.O. Box 149001, Anchorage, Alaska, 99514-9001. Phone, (907) 257-4200; fax, (907) 257-4246.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.