It had been an indifferent week on the stockmarket: Gerry Harvey was all for “lining all the short-sellers up against a wall and shooting them” ... and Fairfax Media had fallen steeply (down 15 per cent to $1.40) after a ban on ‘shorting’ non-financial stocks had been lifted. But at Fairfax’s Rural Press print site in Ormiston, Queensland, in mid-November, the news was all positive: Print trials on the new four-tower Goss Uniliner 80 had begun, with commissioning continuing and hopes the press will go live ahead of the end-December target. With the new Ferag buffer and inserting system – also being commissioned as GXpress went to press – it brings a huge boost to productivity at the site, taking over work from the existing Community press line. Not much more than a year after the press order was announced, a new building to house the press, mailroom and existing Kodak thermal CTP systems has been completed on the 14-hectare site south-east of Brisbane, and is “looking good”. Included in the installation is the first Ferag StreamStitch inline stitch-and-trim facility in the country. Reporting on progress, chief executive web printing Bob Lockley praised the efforts of the Goss engineers and electricians from the company’s Nantes (France) base, and those of Swiss mailroom contractor Ferag. The Uniliner 80 press is one of only a handful arranged in an innovative right-angled configuration Goss calls ‘T90’. Webs are slit at the top of each tower and then turned, neutralising tension issues and – with automated folder and press adjustments – making web-width changes a pushbutton affair, achievable in minutes. This is the feature which decided the group in favour of a double-width option: “Being able to change quickly between web widths finally makes double-width a real option for us,” Lockley told GXpress earlier this year. Paradoxically, press and project management at Ormiston already had some experience of the right-angle concept, thanks to a solus Community tower which had previously been installed at and angle to, and several metres from the main pressline ... and connected via a shaftless drive and QuadTech automatic colour registration controls. The first T90 Uniliner – consisting of only two towers – was installed at Granja in northern Portugal last year, and was later visited by Fairfax executives. It’s an exciting design which embodies many of the features brought together in Goss’s flexible FPS press for its DRUPA 2004 launch – excluding the potential to change cut-off – but at significantly lower cost. With flexibility and automation, cost and the ability of the Nantes ‘assembly-only’ plant to respond quickly to an order have been key elements in the project. Having previously ordered manroland Uniset 2/1 presses for Rural Press’s higher-capacity sites in North Richmond, Ballarat and Mandurah, Lockley indicated after speaking at an Ifra conference in Bangkok in 2005 that he was open to an alternative to the German manufacturer for a future project. Goss has been Rural’s preferred supplier for a series of upgrade projects across its single-width, one-around sites, adding Community towers to create a string of all-colour lines. An existing six-tower Community press is also central to Rural’s latest single-width project, at Tamworth, NSW. Plans for Ormiston were advanced after the merger of Rural Press into Fairfax Media – completed in May last year – in which Lockley and his immediate boss, Brian McCarthy took corresponding roles in Fairfax Media under chief executive David Kirk. A pressing need was to improve production of Fairfax’s Sunday ‘Sun-Herald’, Queensland editions of which were being produced on the existing Community press and largely hand-assembled. Ormiston also prints editions of the six-days ‘Australian Financial Review’ as well as the group’s community and rural newspapers and other work. The press will print an all-colour tabloid product of up to 128 pages at 40,000 cph (collect), with a new Ferag mailroom being commissioned to handle inserting and some finishing. Both the two 2:5:5 jaw folders have inline stitching and one has a quarterfold facility. Automatic colour and cut-off control is by Dutch specialist QI Press Controls – of which Fairfax had good experience with an upgrade at the FRP site in Beresfield, NSW – and Baldwin’s Impact Global blanket washers and Constant C spray dampening are also installed. The single-level press installation reduces the manning requirement and allows ‘line of sight’ management. Goss senior vice president and Nantes general manager Eric Normand says configuration with reelstands and printing towers on a single floor creates a more compact press that can be operated with a smaller crew.“Specially-designed turner bars at the top of each tower also provide a simpler solution to web-width changes and ribbon positioning,” he says. The Uniliner design also addresses the trend towards presses which can print heatset and coldset, and combine both in a single product. A similar Uniliner 80 press – ordered by Fairfax at the same time – is being installed in a new plant for ‘The Press’ in Christchurch, New Zealand.