Consumables
Trelleborg Vulcan Metal News 10 Achieves 20 Million+ Impressions per Fitting at Broughton Printers
Wednesday 30. September 2009 - UK newspaper printer Broughton Printers is achieving 20 million impressions from its offset blankets since changing to Trelleborgs new Vulcan Metal News 10. The blankets are in use on a five-tower KBA Commander press, which was commissioned early last year following a total investment by the company at its Preston factory of around £12m.
“Our KBA Commander is probably the hardest working press in the UK,” says operations director John Coombs. “The press normally runs at 68,000 copies an hour and during the night shift we produce some 350,000 copies of the Daily Star, with the capacity to output 80-pages in full colour. The press is equally busy during the day, printing a mixture of daily and weekly titles for the Johnstone Press.
“Weve had excellent support from Trelleborg and its UK distributor manroland, which have worked closely with us to tailor its new metal-backed blanket to the particular needs of our KBA Commander. We are now very pleased with the consistent results we are obtaining in terms of print quality, performance and durability. As a matter of normal preventative maintenance we change blankets around every three months, by which time they have generally reached twenty million impressions.”
Vulcan Metal News Active incorporates a new film backing and is the result of research by Trelleborgs R&D team, along with its Italian distributor Printgraph, which has been the exclusive Italian distributor for Vulcan blankets for 30 years. Its managing director, Roberto Levi, is the inventor of the Finito series of films and he has worked closely with Trelleborg specialists to develop this latest Finito product, while Trelleborg has perfected a method of adhering the new film to the blankets steel backing.
Conventional adhesive is attacked by a wide range of commonly used press blanket washing agents. Regardless of whether blanket washing is carried out by hand or automatically the cleaning agent will, over a period of time, dissolve the adhesive, with the usual result being that the film separates from the blankets steel backing. This means the press often has to be stopped and the blanket replaced, with subsequent loss of production. Vulcan Metal News Active solves this problem.
Broughton Printers, which is owned by the Northern and Shell group, prints copies of the Daily Express and Sunday Express, Daily Star and Sunday Star and Daily Sports News and Sunday Sports News, plus around 35 local titles each week such as the daily Blackpool Gazette, Wigan Evening Post and Lancashire Evening Post. The newspapers printed at the Lancashire site are delivered as far away as Birmingham, Newcastle and Scotland.