Need to have a small chit chat regarding printing presses and other stuff involved in printing

Cheers

 

i work for a printers/print finishers..although im in the finishing side of things

 

Hi matey thanks for the reply anyway.

I actually own a design company and do in house digital printing as a service we provide. Our company is not at the moment marketed as a printing company but I really do want to enter the field and was wanting to know a thing or two about presses

I have a friend who works at St Ives, and he himself works as a finisher so was limited to what he could tell me

 

like your friend im not in a position to give you much info regarding presses as im a finisher too.

but if you have any questions ill do my best to find out for you

 

Lol which press do i need to buy haha

On a more serious note are there any forums dedicated to the printing community. I was surprised not to come across any

I want something more uk specific

Something like that can get you all kinds of people who can give recommendations on the type of presses suitable, prices i should be looking to pay and other perks that come with entering the field

 

Most commercial printing is based around A4 4 colour process, so to offer the best solutions in that area you need a B2 sized press of 5+ colours, something like a Komori Lithrone 426 sheet-fed. Spot colours are very popular so you need CMYK + at least 1, preferably +2 so you can turn around double sided jobs quicker by sealing them, reducing drying time. A 6 colour press will give you most of the flexibility you need. You need to go to B2 size to allow 4 page printing per side to cross fold into folded booklets/sections. These will either need to be finished externally, or you will also need to invest in a folder, collator and stitcher (usually combined such as Muller Martini's) and a guillotine.

You will also need to supply it with plates, so your current digital workflow system will need a platesetter and appropriate proofing and ripping solutions. I installed a Brisque system with Lotum 400V setter at my last place, along with Iris proofing and we could chuck out 120+ plates a day to keep 2x Lithrones running 24/6. There's no need for massively expensive proofers though now as Epson's and the like are so good. The system I work on now has 5 Mac's serving 5 (Dell) Prinergy servers to 2 Creo Trensetter plate-setters, chucking out up to 600 plates a day and supplying digital data for 4 other remote sites. We use a 40" and 60" HP plotter for content and layout proofing and 2x Epson Pro 7800's for contract proofs. We supply four 32 page and one 8 page press on-site, and a further four 64 page, eight 32 page and four 8 page presses remotely.

 

Dayum Corradoboy, I didnt this there was so much French involved in this.

Boy how do I grasp a lot of these terms, I mean how do "get clued up" with all this palava

Ive been reading up for a few weeks now and come across a Heidelberg GTO 2 colour press for NCR type material and come across a Heidelberg Speedmaster, 5 colour press which a friend of mine works on

Now ive heard other names such as KBA, Man Roland and recently come across Ryobi too

Regarding the Komori, ive heard this is Japans answer to the Heidelbergs but again like i said im not too clued up and am wondering how I get to know more.

Its strange how something you know very little about fascinates you. I look at these 5,6,8 colour presses and get so giddy yet I know so little about them

 

Take alook at Printweek.com
It's the most popular trade mag online with product reviews etc
Kevin

 

Kevin I posted on the forum there and there were no responses. All you get are poor individuals who are wanting to gain business that try to sell you their services. For example I posted regarding entering the Litho industry and I got several people immediately PM me asking me to send them the jobs and they will offer great prices with top quality and very little turn around times lol

 

Don't expect to become a millionaire in the print game, the average return is just 4% and you can get double that leaving your money in the bank. The company I w*rk for is one of the country's (& Europe's) biggest and we lose money hand over fist

There's a massive print expo called IPEX (2010) and the smaller NORTHPRINT (2009) as well as DRUPA in Germany (2012).

 

I was in the printing game for 22yrs, used to run a Heidelberg 10 colour perfector B2. Its a cut-throat business, a lot of companies are going to the wall. The company I used to work for 'Nevisprint' went bust. We lost a lot of our work to abroad like Holland, Malta, Poland and China. Cheaper to get it printed and shipped over than get it done in the UK.

Im not taking micky mouse jobs either, I was printing jobs for Adobe, MOD, Bank of Scotland, Dunfermline Bank and other blue chip companies. When I was redundant, I was offered a job with Heidelberg as a demonstrator but I turned it down. I dont see a long future left for printing in the UK.

Maybe take a look at digital printing, there could be some ££ to made with the quick turn arounds in time to do the job and out the door to the customer.

If your looking for some cheap kit, theres an auction coming up at Nevisprint to sell off the presses. Heidelberg CD 5 colour with coater / Heidelberg Speedmaster 10 colour perfector. Most of the kit in the pre- press dept and plate room as well

 

Anything time critical will stay local. TV guides, celeb bull$h!t with the latest pap-pics etc, but monthly's just need to sort their publishing and editing staff out so they can release their data early enough to hit shipping dates and they can move it abroad. Trouble is, they're bloody hopeless and can't even get stuff to us on time to hit local print and distribution cut-offs We print many of the most popular quality glossy's along with the celeb trash and TV guides, and newspaper supplements. Events such as Big Brother really puts the spanner in the works as they're all desperate to have the latest pics.

 

hi averroes i work for the same company as corradoboy make us an offer that we cant refuse and we will come and work for you on our days off (or at least i will as corradoboy is a very busy man!!) iam a printer based in wakefield.

 

Wo wo lol, easy guys. I think I may have confused you guys when i meant entering into litho printing.

I was talking about something minimal like 2 or 4 colour machines lol not machines worth 100s thousands

Regarding the print industry ive been told by several friends of mine especially one who works at St Ives that even large printing companies are sufferring great losses. He give me an example of two of their MAN Roland web pressess. A year ago both were running concurrently 247. Now he says one is regularly turned off due to lack of jobs coming in.

Myself, I own a corproate design company. Recently I ordered a Xerox DC260 with a professional finisher and over sized high capacity feeder. The reason for this was the need for small run printing jobs. I was getting such jobs on a regular basis hence the need for the system.

However over the last year or so ever week I have been getting 2-3 print jobs which cannot be run on a digital machine. Well they can be run on my machine but it is preferable they be run on a single or two colour press. Such jobs are NCR pads and various stationary such as letterheads, comp slips, envelopes etc.

It is mainly for these jobs I want to enter the market of small scale litho printing.

However I have recently won tenders to some public sector design jobs which require full colour printing at the end. The printing side is not part of the tender but can be forwarded on to me if I prefer, of course I said yes but the problem is i have to outsource such jobs and lose around 70% of my net profits by paying the printer. The way things are looking, I am anticipating more large scale print jobs in the very near future and in order to prepare for this I thought introducing say a 2 colour press to start with would be a nice stepping stone.

Also would you local guys be able to arrange a quick visit to your work places to have a look at some machines in operation?

cheers

 

If your looking at 2 colour presses, maybe worth having a look at 2 colour sra2 perfectors.
If you want to stay down at sra3 size, if I can remember correct the gto could take a numbering machine and a perf, But its been a long time since ive looked at the smaller presses

 

Ive also been told to look at the Heidelberg GTO as well as the Ryobi machines

Whats are your takes on the Ryobi

Also how good are Komori presses

 

you cant go wrong with heidleberg presses built like a bmw (quality)
ryobi used to be cheap and nasty but are much better now
komori are very good
i currently work on a heidelberg web press often we produce 1,000,000 copies over a 24hr period

 

I have literally spent my entire life surrounded by the print industry. There has never been a worse time than this. Good printers are dropping like flies at the moment because their margins have been squeezed so tight it isn't possible to make any money. If you want me to I'll go into the history of how the industry got into this mess, but suffice to say I would strongly recommend not going into the print at this time.

I can understand how you might look at your profits going out the window as you have to get your printing done elsewhere, but you really need to appreciate the flipside of the situation. These days the print industry is all about quality and price. If you go and buy yourself an old (but excellent GTO) you're going to, all other things being equal, be able to compete on price. However, dedicated printers with the latest presses will be able to beat you on quality. You also need to remember that they will also be able to thrash you on price unless you can keep your GTO running almost constantly. So if you have enough work ALL THE TIME you might just be able to undercut the competition, although don't expect to recover anything like the full 70% of your profits that you are currently giving away.

A few other points to bear in mind. If you buy a GTO or any other press with a few hundred million impressions on it you must expect it to go wrong. You're then going to need to call out an engineer with some spare parts to fix it and in the mean time you're going to need to keep paying the wages of the printer/s and get the work done elsewhere. Also don't think you're going to be able to get your consumables cheaper than everyone else because you can't. Period. Overall, profit margins for a good printer are running at about 5% and that is if they have good order books and are running efficiently. Oh yes, a when your current printers **** up the job and it needs reprinting, who picks up the tab for that? I bet it isn't you is it?

One last thing. The wonderful thing about running a design company, as you do, is that there is a huge amount of value added in your work. You seem like a smart cookie so I'm sure you know what that means, but for everyone else it means that the skill of the designer adds the value to the job. With printing it is pretty much the exact opposite. It is the presses, the inks, the paper and the finishing that adds the value. These are all capital intensive items. And they are VERY capital intensive.

So let's sum up. This is what you are going to need.
1. A quality/reliable press.
2. A quality/reliable printer.
3. Enough work to keep the press running almost constantly.

I hope I am not being condescending when I say, please think about this carefully. The amount of investment required is enormous and could bury your company if it goes wrong. And it goes wrong a lot!

ATB

 

Something I've never seen on Scoobynet before, a thread on printing!

I'm an inserting line operator for Trinity Mirror in Watford.

It's not all doom and gloom in the print industry. I've worked for the Mirror (now Trinity Mirror) for nearly 15 years now. We're just coming to the end of a multi million £ overhaul of new printing presses and inserting (mailroom)equipment.

In our Watford plant they've replaced 6 old MAN Roland presses and 6 FERAG inserting lines with the latest MAN Roland presses and FERAG units. There's a vast difference with increased pagination, colour capability, lead times and waste. There's still 6 old Ferag inserting lines and 6 old MAN Roland presses, which TBH are virtually mothballed, and will be used even less when the Indy goes onto the 6th new press is completed.

We're quite fortunate with our products needing to be produced locally and not in Holland or somewhere. We have a large economy of scale, and can afford to take on many local paper contracts.

We've seen a big upsurge in finishing products over the past 18 months. We used to only stitch and trim in house Independent and Mirror magazines, now do several local paper magazines as well as national promotional material. We've had to turn down certain high run contracts (million copies per day) due to only having one SNT Ferag trimmer running on the new equipment. Within the week another trim drum will be plumbed in, and there's a 10 year old SNT unit still trimming copy for the Independent.

Just using one SNT trim unit we can 'finish' up to over 130,000 copies per hour

As highlighted above, there are places where printing plants are going to the wall. But very large printing firms like Trinity who have invested in the latest equipment have the ability to ride this out.

Newscorp have just opened up a big plant in Waltham Cross and have closed Wapping. As far as I know for now there is no inserting facilities, but there are plans for finishing equipment.

Sorry to the OP, it's probably not related to his request but I can't help myself as I've never chatted on Scoobynet before about printing, it's normally all about IT work on here!

 

i work at trinity mirror oldham as an inserting op and thank your lucky stars that you replaced the old man rolands with new man rolands we got wifags which are ****,

also the new ferag kit is not a patch on the old one lol and they've nearly fiished installing our indy inserting line (trialing in next week or so) We get an extra stacker for the indy WOO HOOO still be bobbins when one fails any way rant over lol

 

Choosing to operate on the new gear or the old blue ferag stuff, I'll pick the new gear everytime! On the old Trinity jobs we had to wind up, then insert and wind up and then insert and send to publishing. Even the 'small' runs could tie up a press all day. With the new presses they can handle much higher paginations and a lot of Trinity titles go straight to publishing now.

Our Indy press should be ready come September. The inserting part of the line has been completed, I was running it today.

Are you a line operator or a machine operator? Have you been trained on the MSD, ASB, MTD, JEfs, roll stream, The Matrix and additional KOS computer? Can be quite interesting configuring the KOS to switch presses between inserting lines via the Matrix!

In our inserting dept we don't go through stackers, we leave that to publishing. I hear you have a machine operator and a line op on each line but have the stackers too?

We had a few of your blokes down for training/heath-safety course last week.

 

yes we run all that including the stacks and the SNT with it all being on the same level, basically every member of every crew will be abe to run everything, the only part thats on a different level is the matrix but we have to go up to that when it starts, ask your new tech Bruno what its like down here, not enough staff to run the kit etc, and the quiet small fella down lastr week has just joined my crew lol not seen him since he's been there has he's been off on holidays since.

I like running the new kit, but dont mind when i go back on the old blue stuff its like having a rest up there because when we go back up there we're just on the one bit of kit drum or vp, where on the new stuff its run on that much of a shoe string now, even when were fully staffed we struggle to get the breaks in, and your all over the place watching things,

Anyway enough about the mirror are you going to the mcrae gathering and did you used to chat to another lad on here a few years ago who used to work at oldham cant remember what is user name was now he sold his impreza a while ago and went to mitso's

 

and to the starter of this thread try Home think they will have more info on the kind of stuff that you are looking for although it seems to be mainly states based it has muller etc on there

 

LOL scoobynutter, dont make me sound like a newbie on here by referring to me as the OP. Im the old kilo but with a new username as webby wouldnt let me change my username

More on the above post by Blueblaster. I dont think your condescending at all to be honest, its better to know fact and not fall flat on my face than to dream a rosy dream and find its nothing but a dream.

You are bang on right regarding the design side of things. A predominant chunk of my profits are based on design. Most jobs I send to print have some design charge attached to them so in effect Im doing well on that side. However, as a businessman (i think its safe to say this now as I no longer am a young boy lol) I want to increase profits as any other person would. I mean so far the way my business is going, im making very good money but I believe there is potential for me to make more by cutting my costs i.e. money paid to the printers. However there seems to be various aspects of even small scale litho printing which I never thought of that you have brough to light.

My alternative option is to outsource my Litho work to some else who charges me real trade prices and offers decent quality at the same time but the problem is non of the printing companies I know of are willing to take my jobs on as they are too small, namely Resource Print and GRG in Leeds

I mean realistically speaking on average you always get customers ordering say 2000 letter heads, 2000 comp slips ....

I need to find someone who is willing to do me such small runs at competitive trade prices. Bare in mind these are not the only jobs I have, that is just an example. I mean I get larger quantities of various other marketing material also which lands itself in the 10k units plus.

Before I continue my waffel, Id like to add the reason I mention this. The company who I get my litho printing done from does not do litho work in hourse either. I am basically going through a middle man to get my litho printing work hence the reason my profit margins are so low. He will make his cut on all my jobs.

Ive searched around several companies but really entertain you. To be honest most say they will get back in touch with prices and never do.

Likewise do you guys think any of the companies you guys work for will be able to help me.

I mean i know several "design" companies that use different litho printers but strangly enough I myself cannot find these printers. There are a few i know of but their quality is diabolical

 

ive got a canon multi function printer for sale if thats any use

better than wifag, MSD, USB, ABS, DVD, ferag, winding up, offlining, TTR1, manroland, rolandrat
Speaking as an old No.1 (prob equivelent to team leader or dept manager nowadays)

been away too long

For gods sake don't get puppy power on team leaders, No1s No2s

Hows tricks ScoobyNutta, you still got Chicken Graham as manager over there, ask him if he got his Mk1 Fiesta back (nowt to do with me)
Do you have balloons working with you over there as well

You had Oldham guys there on training, that i'd like to see, they think they invented the *******, i'm right arent i

Ah, memories
sorry for the thread hijack

 

Graham Poulet is still at Watford. Is Richard Gray still at Oldham?

 

For small run letter heads a GTO is a lot of machine. Next time I chat to my dad I'll ask him what he thinks because he's the real expert.

From your last post I reckon your first port of call should be to find a printer that you can deal with direct - middle men are the scurge of the industry. There isn't any money in letterheads these days, but I'm sure there will be a one man band in your area that still offers that kind of service. If you can't find anything in the yellow pages then maybe British Print will be able to point you in the right direction.

Will post back again when I have spoken to dad.

 

no Richard Gray gone to a firm called Prinovis in Liverpool we have John Brewis now, much the same hardly ever see him, we all think Gray jumped ship before he was pushed, (down to the buying of wifags) cant believe they have bought another one for the indy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Gray wasn't that popular in watford. Apart from the faux pax of a front wheel drive Lotus, he made the lads sweep down A frames one quiet day instead of letting us go amongst many other errors.

I've PM'd you puppy.

 

Blue, thanks for the reply matey. Regarding money in letterheads, yes there isnt much specifically in letterheads but generally in stationary there is lots of money to be made by an independant corporate design company. Your are spot on regarding middle men but im getting frustrated as i cant find any decent litho printers direct that can help me. surely there are some out there and local as these guys i know are using them.

Other stuff I need includes Spot UV and various other specialist finishing services