Tensor Presses Ship to France, Start Up in Vientnam

By: E&P Staff Tensor Group Inc., Woodridge, Ill., will ship three web offset four-color press towers this month to La Societe Cherbourgeoise d'Editions, publisher of La Presse de la Manche, a daily in Cherbourg, France.

The Tensor T-400 four-high towers will replace two Solna 2+1 units, expanding capacity with 12 more full-color broadsheet pages. The overnight newspaper run will produce 30,000-36,000 copies of the 32-page broadsheet, with 20 of those pages in full color (up from eight). The day shift will run a 64-page tabloid with 40 pages in color.

The purchase coincides with the paper's recent 120th anniversary celebration. "Expanding our newspaper production facility with the new Tensor equipment is very appropriate as we reach this impressive milestone in our company's history," Marcel Clairet, President Directeur General, La Presse de la Manche, said in a statement.

The T-400 towers are equipped with DCOS press controls, which integrate and manage the DRCS closed-loop register and cutoff, GMI remote-inking system, Inventor Graphics spray dampening and footprint-shaftless drive motors. Tensor also is retrofitting these auxiliaries onto an existing Solna G150 tower, which will tie into the press line. Three Megtec Amal AR 30 pasters will be added at a right angle to the press.

La Presse de la Manche is part of Groupe SIPA Ouest-France, a multi-media company with five dailies and 60 weeklies. Its sites also print many free weekly news tabloids.

Tensor also announced that Vietnam's Cantho General Printing Joint Stock Co. has put into production its two-tower, one-folder, shaft-driven singlewide T-400BE press with an H-50 folder, greatly increasing its newspaper production volume (E&P Online, July 29, 2009).

Fed by four splicers, the towers' capacity can reach 32 pages of two-color tabloid, with the main jobs running 24 tabloid pages with 8 pages of four-color and 16 pages of two-color. Several dailies and weeklies are now printed on the Tensor press.

While Cantho General Printing also prints magazines and books, it bought the Tensor press to add pages and color and to support the higher demand for newspaper subscriptions in Vietnam (where it is the first new Tensor press).