Plant manager Eric Elyn explains. "Our Colorman 35 was installed in 2000 and is designed to enable us to change the printing plates on three towers while the press in running. This means that we normally have only nine towers printing at any one time, but the benefit is that we can usually change plates for the next job without stopping the press, while wastage during changeover is minimal. It was a balance between investing more at the beginning in order to achieve greater productivity later on. "In those early years after the installation of the satellite Colorman, we were essentially a newspaper printer handling a small amount of commercial work. However, this has changed totally over the last five years and during a typical day the manroland press produces commercial jobs for about 18 to 19 hours. Around 500 000 newspapers, made up of 32 different editions, are printed over a four hour period by the night shift. "This switch of emphasis placed much greater quality demands on the press and we couldn't simply buy a new one! The solution lay in the blankets, so we contacted the leading suppliers and manufacturers. They all claimed to have the answer, but what each of them offered was just a model from their standard range and when these were tested on the Colorman we never achieved our needs for high print quality and speed - at least never more than for a couple of weeks," says Eric Elyn. "The task was not straightforward as the lack of gears on the Colorman has a huge impact on how blankets perform. Even when running the cylinder motors at full power, the negative and positive feed properties on some of the blankets we tested were so great that the speed of the press could be reduced to as little as 20 000 cph. "If we tried to overcome this by increasing power to the motors, the safety cut out stopped the press. This situation presented a major challenge in terms of producing work within the ever shorter time frames, while also remaining competitive in the marketplace. These blankets did generally provide good print quality but only combined with low productivity. Those blankets that allowed the Colorman to run at its top speed produced unacceptable print quality, certainly to our commercial customers. "Trelleborg was the one manufacturer that really listened to what we needed and its Vulcan 202 has performed so effectively during four months of tests on one tower that we decided to fit this to all 192 blanket cylinders. To give Trelleborg its due credit, the top layer and carcass technology combined within Vulcan 202 is magnificent." Vulcan 202 is designed specifically for coldset web offset presses. The closed cell compressible layer provides a neutral feed that does not affect the speed of the paper as it passes between the cylinders and therefore, says Trelleborg, puts the press completely in control of the web. Removing this variable makes systems such as automatic registration equipment much more efficient and on older web offset presses this is a huge aid to cost effectiveness. The Trelleborg blanket also offers high resistance to swelling and wear. Vulcan 202 is already in use at major newspaper sites in countries such as Russia, UK, Finland, Spain and Italy.
Newspaper titles produced by Printing Partners Brussels include Het Nieuwsblad (300 000 copies), De Standaard (120 000 copies), Vers L'Avenir (110 000 copies), Zaman (9 000 copies) plus the Daily Star and Daily Express (10 000 copies). These are all printed on standard 45 gsm newsprint. The wide range of commercial work includes the weekly freesheets Passe-Partout, of which five million copies are produced consisting of 96 editions, and 1,3 million copies of Visie.