German Pressmaker Aims for Add-on, Upgrade Markets

By: Jim Rosenberg Little known in the United States but almost as old as Editor & Publisher, Hermann Clauberg GmbH & Co. builds extensions to existing singlewide and two-around doublewide presses, typically to provide additional or improved color. Clauberg also promotes its mono units as part of a non-stop plate-changing solution for existing color towers.

The company also offers new, faster jaw folders, performs retrofits and supplies new press electrical systems, with interfaces to editorial and prepress systems and online diagnostics.

Exhibiting at this week?s IFRA Expo in Vienna, fourth-generation owner Lorenz Magnus (whose son also works for Clauberg) said his company was founded in 1885, when its home, Berlin, had not six but 100 newspapers. Clauberg also builds a line of book presses.

Though not a familiar name in the U.S., Clauberg years ago supplied newspaper presses at two sites in California and a clothing-pattern press to a Chicago customer, according to Magnus.

Its direct-drive Colorstar presses -- the eight-page SW 70 and 16-page DW 70 and DW 75-- are available as mono units, H-type units and four-high (blanket-to-blanket) towers for the SW and DW 70 models, and as a 10-cylinder satellite for the DW 75. Clauberg supplies Megtec pasters.

All have cylinders with three-race bearings. All presses are equipped with removable ink fountains (full, half, pagewide), segmented ink fountain blades, Teflon-coated pick-up and oscillating ink distributor rollers, ink fountain rollers with stepless frequency motors for creating ink curves to match different types of production, console-controlled ink-zone screws with micromotors, spray-bar dampening and temperature-controlled dampening solution recirculation.

Among options available are blanket washers, automatic color register control, on-the-fly unit clutching, bearers, automatic plate changing for the SW and DW 70 and anti-fanout for the DW 70.

The company builds a 2:3:3 folder (up to 80 broadsheet pages collect) and a 2:5:5 folder (up to 96 pages) with a range of options. Standard features for both include running lap adjustment, 70-degree formers with air-blown edges, and two molybdenum-surface RTF rollers driven together for variable gain.

Clauberg showed blanket-to-blanket and satellite extensions to the same manroland doublewide press at Vechta, in northern Germany. Its newest extension is its second for another German newspaper, in Holzminden. And in Goteborg, Sweden, the company stacked a Colorman unit to create a color position, replaced drives and web lead, and added automatic web-up.

The company also has sold equipment in China, where ?they need a lot of machines, [and] the biggest order gets Clauberg folders,? says Magnus.