Consumables
USAs First Baldwin Tower Clean Offers Fast Return On Investment At Lancaster County Weeklies
Friday 04. April 2008 - Lancaster County Weeklies in Pennsylvania has added around 15 hours of productivity each week to its MDGM 440 newspaper press, following the commissioning in January of the USAs first Baldwin Tower Clean automatic blanket cleaning system. The inexpensive Baldwin Tower Clean system has reduced the three-hour manual wash previously required on the single-width, five-tower press to around two minutes.
“The increase in productivity is extremely impressive but weve also found that Baldwins Tower Clean system results in a more thorough clean than we could achieve by washing the blankets manually,” says press manager Wayne Fauzer. “The Tower Clean equipment uses around one gallon of solvent to clean the blankets on all five towers.
“The Baldwin system requires between 300-400 cylinder revolutions to complete the on-impression clean and this paper, which will have absorbed some of the solvent, can be disposed of along with normal waste stock from the press. During manual cleaning, our operators would go through around 80 hand rags, which would then be washed in-house before reuse.
“However, another very important point about the automatic blanket cleaning technology is that it has taken away an unpleasant task from the press operators. They are a great deal happier with the new situation, and with ever stringent health and safety issues blanket cleaning is an area of print production that is increasingly being examined.”
Baldwins Tower Clean blanket cleaning system, which is available for single-width and double-width newspaper presses, consists of a solvent applicator per tower, brush units and pumping station. Depending upon the ink, stock, period between cleaning and the dampening system used, the total waste copies required could be less than 200 copies for each cleaning cycle. Tower Clean enables the blanket to be cleaned by contact with the moving web once the small profile applicator has applied a low VOC solvent to the paper. As the web reaches the blankets, on impression, the ink is removed from all blankets and carried away by the paper. The brush unit, which is often installed only on the A and B level of the first down blanket, is then activated and this removes lint and ink. In addition, the Tower Clean process has a positive cleaning effect on the guide rollers.
Lancaster County Weeklies has tried the automatic blanket cleaning process at various stages of production with good success, but normally carries out the process at the end of a print run. “Its too early to say what the return on investment will be but Tower Clean certainly saves a lot of valuable press time,” says Wayne Fauzer.
The largest title produced at the Ephrata site is Lancaster Farming Weekly, a 280-page weekly with a print run of around 70,000. The company also prints a range of other weekly and monthly titles on a contract basis, as well as work for local colleges and schools.