Fairfax Orders Goss Uniliners for Queensland, New Zealand

By: E&P Staff Fairfax Media Group placed an order with Goss International for two shaftless doublewide Uniliner presses, 80,000-copy-per-hour presses to be installed at Rural Press Printing in the Brisbane suburb of Ormiston, Queensland, Australia and at Christchurch Press in New Zealand by the end of 2008.

Fairfax Regional Manager Anthony Payne called the Goss Uniliner a fast, flexible upgrade to Ormiston's a six-tower singlewide Goss Community. "Since our merger with Rural Press last May, we have been running at almost maximum capacity, so it's definitely time for a change," he said in a statement.

The new presses will print up to 128 pages tabloid in full color and will be configured as four four-high towers and two 2:5:5 jaw folders inline stitching. One folder will have quarterfolding capability. The towers and reelstands will sit 90 degrees to the press line, similar to the configuration of Goss FPS presses, and will have the highest level of automation currently available. Various finishing options also will be supplied for magazine-style supplements.

"The right-angle arrangement with webs slit and turned inline with the formers is the solution to the issue of double-width presses running different paper web-widths," Payne said. "By moving the turner bars, the ribbons are aligned with the formers, giving infinite web-width variability between two set points." The press will be able to print square and standard tabloids of various sizes as well as different broadsheet formats.

Ormiston now prints a local edition of the Sydney Sun Herald, Trading Post and Australian Financial Review, with heatset sections outsourced to other printers, while Christchurch Press prints The Press, the Sunday national Star Times, and tabloid Christchurch Mail.

To go into a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city, the Uniliner for Christchurch Press will add flexibility to production of the six-day Press, which prints up to 172 broadsheet pages on Saturdays.