When lint from the high-speed newsprint webs mixes with ink on the blankets, you end up with a sticky, gooey mess that can mess up a press run pretty quickly. So depending on the speed of the presses and the size of the press run, someone has to spend about a half-hour every 100,000-to-150,000 im- pressions cleaning off the gunk to maintain high print quality and reduce blanket wear.

But Manuel Marquez has changed all that. Having spent years observing the inner-workings of presses, the former Mercury News mechanical superintendent devised a sleek, elegant solution to press-blanket gunk, and the hazardous materials and stress injuries that have traditionally gone hand-in-hand with getting rid of it.

	A lint-busting cut-nylon brush, which traverses the press blanket during runs, quickly made the transition from press to promotional materials.

Along with winning this year’s TechNews Best Practices Award in the Materials category, Marquez’ Lint Buster is now manufactured and sold by Denver-based Machine Design Service Inc. Its workings are simple: A cut-nylon brush about three inches in diameter rotates at high speed, traversing the blanket every 30,000 impressions. It has a built-in vacuum cleaner, so dust never gets a chance to build up. When a press needs to be serviced, the 65-pound Lint Buster is easily removed and self-adjusting (the device has a spring return to pull it away from the blanket, but uses a continuous-pressure air stream to push the brush against the blanket).

After 37 years in the newspaper business, Marquez, a young 61, retired shortly before Christmas to his ranch in Colorado, where he and his wife will be able to live much closer to their daughters. Marquez spent the last 10-plus years in San Jose, where his invention has been cleaning press blankets for three years. (In place at the Los Angeles Times, a Dow Jones & Co. plant and sites in Vancouver, England and Germany, it’s also in testing at The Seattle Times.)

“Manuel has invented so many things over the years that it’s amazing,” says Jerry Polk, Mercury News vice president of operations, who has worked with Marquez more on than off since they were both at The Denver Post in 1985. “We’ve had vendors call because they want him to make sure they’ve got it right. He’s a mechanical whiz.”

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Although he has no obligations to continue working on the product, Marquez says he would like to be involved in creating enhancements. From his cabin 9,000 feet in the mountains near Alamosa, Colo., Marquez expects to work on some other ideas, and “still continue to be involved.” After all, he says, “I’ve loved every day of it. I’ve met some beautiful people with incredible brain power.”

The prospect of Marquez’ continued involvement in the newspaper business comes as a major relief to Polk. “Manuel’s the best. I don’t know what I’d do without him,” he says. “He’s just too good to disappear.”