Just a year after GXpress first broke news of Goss’s plans for a new ‘super Community’ capable of complete edition changes in a couple of minutes, we’re among the first to see the new press up and running.
But not the first: A quartet of top executives from New York’s Staten Island Advance had a sneak preview… and placed the first order.Advance Publications – one of America’s largest privately-owned companies with holdings including fashion publisher Conde Nast – will install the first press in October this year.
But it seems dozens of publishers may be lining up to follow them: Goss launches a series of ‘open house’ showings this Friday, and by the time of the last planned event, just after Ipex, more than 50 newspaper, book and commercial printers will have checked out the press.
With a print deadline looming, GXpress Magazine was treated to an advance showing this morning, even as designs for an operating cam on the slick automatic plate changing device were still being refined.
It will, we are confident, be all right on the night.
In fact installation of a modified cam profile was delayed while Goss Shanghai engineering director Jean Claude Pautrat and his team – including Preston-based press and software engineers – put the press through its paces for GXpress.
And yes, we’re impressed.
As a former Goss customer – in a previous life I signed for a four-unit Community SC in 1977 – I’ve noted the engineering quality is backed by understated claims: So the Magnum Compact tower at Goss’s factory in Yun Ling Road East doesn’t change a full set of plates in three minutes as Goss Asia Pacific sales vice president Peter Kirwan said it would last year; it does it in two.
Pautrat says the Advance team – with up to 80 edition changes a day to consider – were looking for ‘good copy to good copy’ change in two minutes and 15 seconds. What they got were changes frequently in less than two minutes.
It’s a critical performance that could make the difference for print publishers all over the world, extending the life of print in developed markets and creating new opportunities in those still developing. Kirwan says there is strong regional interest and publishers “of all sizes from the largest to the smallest” in India and southeast Asia will be among guests inspecting the new press in coming weeks.
Jean Claude Pautrat says the project dates back almost two years, following recognition that Goss needed a new press to compete with inkjet webs which were becoming faster and better able to match web-offset print performance.
“It needed to be as small as possible, and it needed to be highly automated,” he says.
And Goss had both: The slide-apart technology which combines accessibility with the 2.2 metre tower height comes from the Preston-built Goss FPS press, while it also shares features with the Colorliner CPS which caught the eye of Charles and Camilla at DC Thomson in Dundee last year.
There have been ‘compact’ towers before, but what struck me today was the immediacy of the accessibility: Two sections containing ink and water forme rollers slide away from a central core with no need of guards to get in the way, because the press can’t turn when they are parted.
For automation, flashback to DRUPA 1995, and among innovations such as Benny Landa’s Indigo digital press and Heidelberg’s DI… and there’s an M-600 commercial web with fully-automatic plate changing. Since then, with technology retrieved from the Harris Web ideas cupboard by Heidelberg, it has been progressively refined by Goss International until today the system handles the plates on 96-page heatset giants… and those on the Magnum Compact.
And yes, as I shared time this morning with Chinese engineers installing a revised cam profile on the Autoplate unit, it keeps getting better. Today, just three air cylinders drive functions, making the device appear deceptively simple.
The same is true of the software which controls the press, from the sequences that optimise press start-ups and slowdowns, and those which control plating operations.
Pautrat (62) has followed these and other developments through a parallel course in the industry… with Marinoni in Montataire (France) and through the web press maker’s successors, Harris, Heidelberg and Goss, the new press eyed as a final achievement before retirement.
Brought together in a single press, the technologies he has overseen address issues being faced throughout the world: shorter print runs, interest in hyperlocal editions, and the need to maximise output from a single plant. At the same time, publishers are realising that single-width – or specifically one-around – presses can not only meet their current needs, but offer a degree of flexibility not found with double or triple-wide. Not to mention simple web-width variation and the opportunity with a new press to save paper by reducing cutoff.
Until recently, only wide presses delivered the critical mass needed to justify sophisticated plate changing systems, but the Magnum Compact changes that.
No need for more, given that I’ve written thousands of words about this press in the past 12 months. Here instead, are the first pictures.
Peter Coleman