Tensor Designs, Installs Press with 700mm Cutoff

By: E&P Staff Tensor Group Inc., Woodridge, Ill., has installed a press line at BEA Printing Bvba, Mechelen, Belgium. The 700mm cutoff press is a new product from Tensor.

Owned by Colasanto Group, which manages 28 presses that print numerous international dailies at 12 locations in Italy, BEA Printing opened its Belgian plant in 2003, printing 3,000 copies each of Il Giornale and La Stampa on an old Creusot Loire Gazette, as well as the International Herald Tribune and Il Sole 24 Ore on a Super Gazette. Last July it contracted to print the Financial Times and two other international papers. BEA sought a press manufacturer that could meet its new clients' print quality demands.

When approached to build a new, large-cutoff product, "initial concerns involved engineering hurdles and costs, production capability and overall market demand," Tensor President Don Gustafson said in a statement. "We knew the least expensive approach of simply enlarging the cylinders and keeping the T-1400 frame design static was definitely not desirable," he said. "Engineering needed to examine issues like cylinder deflection and bearing life."

The 700mm units' new design features include stronger, more rigid frames with high and wide archways for easier access. The press' larger plate and blanket cylinders required thicker journals and bearings. Form, oscillator, and transfer rollers were enlarged, as were the ink fountain and micrometric rollers.

The meter-wide T-1400 Series press consists of 15 units (two four-high towers, three two-high towers, one mono unit), two Tensor H-50 heavy-duty jaw folders, seven floor-mounted Tensor rollstands equipped with Robertson brakes and two Jardis zero-speed splicers.

The units include motorized sidelay and circumferential, as well as motorized unit-to-unit phasers and linear compensators, Baldwin brush dampening, insulated water trays, T bar blanket lock-ups, and slit-style plate lock-ups.

The 1:2:2 folders include quarter folders redesigned to accommodate the higher cutoff, which together enable BEA to print twice as many pages per footprint. For Italy's 35 cm x 50 cm papers, BEA prints with a 100 cm paper width on its new 700mm cut-off press, which provides more color pages and produces a good-size tabloid paper, according to Tensor.