You want drama, tension, suspense? Check out the “flying paste.” You want sadness, disappointment and tragedy? Try a web break.

So who traverses these emotional peaks and valleys to keep the monster running right? The maintenance crews. We’re talking a bunch of folks with extreme expertise in the nuances of gears, motors, formers, angle bars, ink fountains, folder pin-post bushings.

Huh? Yeah, folder pin-post bushings.

Tom Croteau, NAA’s newspaper-services vice president, provides some insight: “The pins punch through the web,” he says, “and they grab the web and hold it tight around the folder cylinder where it’s folded and cut off.”

	The Orange County Register's experimental folder pin-post bushings, manufactured by a local machine shop using oil-lite bronze, sit next to the wooden ones the paper convinced its press supplier to replace.

There can be as many as 10 of them on a folder, punching in and out, in and out, at mind-numbing speeds when everything’s rolling—you can see the little holes along the bottom of your Sunday morning newspaper.

But the pins can break. “You can get by with losing one or two,” Croteau says. “If you lose too many, the paper goes through the folder crooked” with results that will be obvious on your customers’ doorsteps.

All of which brings us to the pin-post bushings, which hold those frenetic pins in place, and to one Adolph Bereki, a production maintenance pressroom mechanic at the Orange County Register.

When the bushings wear out, the pins can start to wobble and then break. If you catch them in the wobbly stage and yank them as part of preventive maintenance, it costs about $2,500 in parts roughly every three months. If you neglect them, and they break during the run...well, it ain’t pretty.

So it stands to reason that you’d want to make those bushings of some slippery but extremely strong space-age material like NASA would use in the Space Shuttle. Uh, no—the bushings are made largely from wood. And we should be surprised that it wears down?

So it fell upon Bereki to advance the state of the pin-post art. Two early candidates for the slippery-but-strong title were Teflon, star of skillets everywhere, and Derelin, a similarly slick plastic compound. But they couldn’t stand up to the heat from the friction of pins hurtling in and out. So they melted instead of wearing down, resulting in the continuing embarrassment of wobbly pin posts.

THE WINNERS Pre-Press Materials Post-Press Health & Safety Table of Contents

Space-age compounds failing him, Bereki looked to the past and came up with something just slightly newer than wood—bronze. Specifically, oil-lite bronze, which, according to Bereki’s boss, Randy Perry, is impregnated with oil so it never needs lubrication.

With Orange County Register press supplier Goss Graphic Systems still pushing wood, Bereki took one of the wooden bushings to a local machine shop and had folks there make the bronze bearings for a test.

The test bushings were installed on one of the Register’s folders in June. As of October, they were still running great, with nary a pin-wobble.

(By the way, it turns out that the custom-made bronze bearings were less expensive then the off-the-rack wood-compound ones Goss had been supplying. Run that one past your local bean-counter for solid entertainment value.)

For its part, Goss liked the idea so much that it now sells bronze bushings instead of the wooden ones. And what does Bereki get out of it? For one thing, he doesn’t have to rip those folders apart as much anymore.

For another, he gets a TechNews Best Practices award.