A long-awaited new all-colour press for the Hobart ‘Mercury’ is taking shape on schedule and should be in production in mid-May. One of two Agfa Polaris CTP lines is to be moved next month to the new Glenorchy Technopark site, 20 minutes north of the Tasmanian capital, in time for print trials. As GXpress went to press, production manager Wayne Bailey reported that with building work on the press, reel storage and publishing areas complete, installation was underway, with three towers in position. Six KBA Comet single-width towers and two folders – capable of 96 pages of back-to-back colour production, and including inline stitching and quarterfold – will be commissioned in an installation which replicates that at News Limited’s Gold Coast ‘Bulletin’ site. The Ferag mailroom includes online inserting and trimming, but no reeled product buffering. Sections go directly from the press to the two inserting drums, with preprint and inserts coming from hand feeders. “Building work on the remaining areas – for administration toilets, lunch and meeting rooms – is almost done, and on the press, the reelstands and PATRAS reel delivery tracks are all in position and complete,” he says. “We’re expecting that the first folder will be in position by the weekend. In the publishing area, the two insert drums and one trimming drum are in position and work is going on with track and transfer stations.” Commissioning of the new plant in May will bring to an end the outsourcing of colour sections and supplements amounting to 40 per cent of the 153-year-old ‘Mercury’ editions from Fairfax Media neighbour the Launceston ‘Examiner’, and by PMP Print in Melbourne. Fairfax has already closed its Burnie site, switching work from its manroland Uniset press to the Goss Community at Launceston. The new plant – a $32 million ‘vote of confidence’ in the future of Tasmania and its flagship daily – was announced in July 2007, with a final decision on the choice of press coming close to the end of the year. News had commissioned a similar KBA press at Molendinar on Queensland’s Gold Coast in 2004, but despite the “obvious synergies’, agreement of the contract took longer than expected. The new KBA Comet replaces a 35-year-old Goss Urbanite – moved from Leader Newspapers in Melbourne in 1993 for the transition from letterpress to web-offset – is limited to 16 pages of colour in a product of up to 80 pages. Weekday circulation of the ‘Mercury’ is 51,000 and 80,000 at weekends, with the Davies Brothers operation also publishing the statewide ‘Sunday Tasmanian’ (circulation about 60,000). Careful spending is helping to keep News' upgrade programme rolling News Limited is pushing ahead with what is one of the Australian operation’s busiest programmes of press installations and upgrades. Two of the programmes – in Adelaide and Townsville – are spin-offs from the successful completion of a $200 million upgrade at Chullora, Sydney, where four new manroland Geoman presses have been installed to replace existing Newsman equipment installed in 1994 as part of a historic order covering News sites in Australia and the UK. And in Hobart, installation of a new KBA Comet single-width press, similar to that at the ‘Gold Coast Bulletin’, is underway. Performance of the new Geoman presses at Chullora led to a decision to divert a fifth press intended for the site to Townsville, and it is the displaced eight-printcouple towers from Sydney which are being used in the Adelaide upgrade. Group technical manager Barry Johnson says big lifts at the Mile End, SA, site are scheduled for the end of April, following steam cleaning and removal of the units from Sydney. At the same time, Baldwin Jetstream web cleaning equipment is being added to some of the existing units, increasing the number of impressions between blanket wash-ups. The innovative application follows trials at two News sites and, Johnson says, “all out tests prove conclusively that it works.” The Jetstream installations should be complete by mid-year. Together the two upgrades will increase the amount of 4/4 colour which can be used in ‘The Advertiser’ and associated publications, and improve deadlines. Four-colour availability on the press increases by 64 pages to 96 pp tabloid. Johnson says upgrade work in Sydney is almost complete, with the last stage the $1.5 million refurbishment of an earlier Geoman press (designated ‘A Press’) which had been installed in 1996. The ‘spare’ new Geoman – made available from the decision not to replace one Newsman (B Press) in Sydney – goes into a new presshall annexe in Townsville, where building plans are just going to tender. With this exception, all of the major expenditure involved in the projects has already been contracted, “It’s a good time to buy, and a good time to build,” says Johnson. “In the present economic environment we’re lucky to be doing this much. From the budget point of view it’s probably our busiest period.” The $52 million project for Townsville was announced last August, with the five-tower, two folder Geoman press – capable of 160 pages of back-to-back colour – as its centrepiece. It takes the North Queensland home of the ‘Townsville Bulletin’ to the latest manroland press technology at a stroke, replacing a press displaced from the old Bowen Hills plant of the ‘Courier-Mail’ and refurbished in 1997 A new Ferag mailroom system is to go into the old press hall, making the installation a complex five-stage process. The new publishing room is being overlaid into the existing room – where a mezzanine floor already exists – and the area of the old press table.