More Goss Presses for IPS

By: E&P Staff SPIR Communication, a free-newspaper and commercial printer in France, ordered two identical Goss International M-600C web presses for it's Reyrieux plant, north of Lyons, one of its IPS group's five print sites. The first press is scheduled for delivery next February, and the second six months later.

The presses will print a free magazine that is published every three weeks in 45 local editions and a circulating 2.5 million copies that vary from 16 to 96 pages. The new capacity will enable IPS eventually to bring back outsourced printing jobs and to consider producing up-market magazines.

"We chose the M-600 from among three nearly identical presses," Cartoux said, adding, "we were persuaded by the argument of uniform maintenance for all these presses. At a technical level, the Autoplate ... system also influenced our decision, as it allows us to considerably speed-up job changeover without having to invest in an additional printing unit for flying plate changes." The plant is one of three running Mainstream doublewide newspaper presses (see below).

Each M-600C press consists of four units equipped with an Autoplate fully automatic plate-loading system, Ecocool dryer and JF-55 folder. The M-600C, equipped with multidrive, can produce up to 55,000 copies per hour. It will be supplied to SPIR with the Goss Omnicon control system and Omni Makeready module for reducing start-up waste.

Francis Cartoux, SPIR director and chairman of IPS SAS printing operations, said his group has worked with Goss Universal and Community presses (some with up to 28 units and equipped with dryers) "for a very long time" and, since 2002, has worked with the former Heidelberg plant in Montataire, which built its Mainstreams.

Earlier this summer, Goss, headquartered in Bolingbrook, Ill., acquired the assets of Heidelberg Web Systems from Germany's Heidelberger Druckmaschinen. Citing customer risk in choosing a supplier for any investment as large as a web press and supplier risk in merging and reorganizing, Cartoux said IPS regards the acquisition as more than a "simple absorption, but rather a concentration of know-how: that of Goss for newspaper web presses and that of Heidelberg for commercial presses.

Goss reports that since spring start-up of the new Chassieu IPS production plant, east of Lyon, its two Mainstream presses have been printing 300,000 copies of the 10 editions of the daily regional Le Progr?s de Lyon, along with the free daily Lyon Plus and its supplement, Lyon Figaro. (The third Mainstream installation for IPS is near Amiens, where the press went into production in fall 2002, as did that in Reyrieux.)

In its new 500mm-by-370mm format and 24 four-color pages, Le Progr?s is printed on two Mainstream 1-by-4 (one page around, four pages across) presses, each with 34 couples, eight webs and one JF-255 folder with four formers. Press crews and maintenance teams were extensively trained in the training center and on-site.

"Make-ready times between the different editions of Le Progr?s are extremely short, thanks to the plate tension system," said Le Progr?s Assistant General Manager Marien Bonieux. One operator can simultaneously change the plates on the lower and upper couples in less than two minutes. For a complete job change, a full deplating sequence can be launched from the Omnicon control console.

For the 1,000 plates that the operation produces and mounts daily for the night shift, the 1x4 Mainstream has the advantage of requiring half the plates of a conventional 16-page, two-around doublewide running in straight mode, thereby cutting plate costs. This is an advantage that reduces the costs of plates, the platemaking, investment and plate production and changeover time.

An average of 20 minutes had been needed to change all plates and perform all make-ready operations between two jobs (inter-editions of Le Progr?s, title and pagination changes). Time between two editions is now five to 10 minutes. Operating the press is further assisted with the Omnipage automatic page recognition system, which detects an unnoticeable mark on the page that the operator uses to make quality settings and automatically select the corresponding couples in the press.