Ogden’s Heatset Edge
by Constance Holloway
By next fall, the Standard-Examiner will have a new edge in the com-petitive commercial-printing field.
The Ogden, Utah, daily’s new press will be equipped for heatset printing, a rarity among U.S. papers. Manufactured by KBA North America Inc.’s Web Press Division of York, Pa., the six-tower Comet press will feature one vertically installed Megtec heatset dryer with chill roll standards, says Bruce Richardson, national accounts manager of KBA North America.
While planning the press, Standard-Examiner executives visited commercial printers, searching for the right tool to expand printing capabilities.
"Part of what we want to do is become a commercial printer," says Al Waldron, the paper’s operations director. "We felt heatset would give us additional capacity not only for our newspaper, but also for the commercial market."
Heatset printing, commonly used by commercial printers, produces a higher-quality image than the offset-printing units most newspapers use. Like newspaper staffers in other parts of the world, those in Ogden are considering using the capacity to print higher-quality section fronts. "We could do the outside four pages or the inside four pages of a section," and produce "nicer covers," Waldron says.
But commercial printing remains the driving force behind the heatset decision. "We might print a four-page or eight-page product [for advertisers] that goes into our paper," says Waldron. The paper is already touting the benefits of its new press to advertisers with brochures promising "high-quality color reproduc-tion similar to that seen in USA Today."
The more traditional components of the Comet also bode well for commercial-printing prospects. Each tower will be equipped with eight shaftless couples with a capacity of 64 collect pages, 48 back-to-back pages of process color, or 32 pages of process color plus 32 pages of spot color.
The Standard-Examiner already prints several independent publications on its presses, including the City Weekly, the Mountain Times tabloid, a publication geared to the Hispanic community and an Air Force newspaper. Still, without the capacity for heatset printing, Waldron says the paper’s commercial-printing ventures would remain limited.
"A lot of things we either turn down or put on hold until we have the press to print them. There’s just a lot more products we can do," says Waldron.
Waldron expects the Thanksgiving 2000 paper to be the first to roll off the Comet. Sixty-to-90 days later, he says, the paper should be using the heatset feature to print advertisements, editorial pages and commercial jobs.
Holloway is a Charlotte, N.C., free-lancer. E-mail, choll47013@aol.com.
Thomson’s Pressroom Simulator
It’s the newspaper version of fighter-pilot training: simulated press runs training operators without spilling a drop of ink or spoiling a piece of paper.
The simulator was developed for Thomson Newspapers as part of its agreement last year to buy three single-width shaftless presses from MAN Roland Inc. of Westmont, Ill. First installed at Thomson’s South Louisiana strategic-market group, the system has helped press operators hone their skills on everything from improper registration and ink-and-water balance to web breaks.
The PC-based software "forces the operator to correct anything that could go wrong, and then it counts the number of copies it takes to get it right," says Steve Strout, Thomson’s chief technology officer. "Presses like this one can be expensive, so we want to ensure our employees have the appropriate education and training," Strout adds, calling the system "another tool for our employees to build their process of lifelong learning."
The system was developed by Sinapse, a French software company specializing in manufacturing simulation. Press operators watch a simulated console identical to the one on the press, and pick exercises that help them resolve 28 different types of printing problems. One computer monitor shows the press-control settings, while another displays the effects of various adjustments on a simulated newspaper page.
Sherman Trahan, director of printing and production at Thomson South Louisiana, plans to train 10 operators before the system is shipped to Appleton, Wis., where installation of two more MAN Roland presses began this fall (TechNews, May/June 1999, p. 7). The simulator enables operators to train at their own speed and on a schedule that accommodates production needs with existing equipment, Trahan notes. Once new press equipment is installed and running, the simulator can also be used for refresher courses and for training new hires, he adds.
Mainstream on Track
As Heidelberg Web Systems readied for next year’s much-anticipated newspaper-press debut, it recorded a newspaper-printing milestone.
During
testing in August, the Dover, N.H., company produced the first newspaper
pages printed with a gapless blanket, as lead engineer Charlie Dufour
(pictured at left) watched. Like other features expected in Heidelberg’s
newspaper-press debut, the gapless blanket was adapted from the company’s
commercial-printing presses, on which the technology was introduced in
1993.
Under what Heidelberg calls "tight security," assembly continues on the prototype Mainstream 80, to debut at Drupa 2000. The shaftless eight-page press prints up to 80,000 copies per hour, and features a compact tower design, flying edition-change capabilities, and optimized folder and former designs for straight-run production.