First Stage Ends

We have come to the end of the first major stage of our press installation with the placement of the feeder and delivery units. All of the really big heavy pieces are now in place and bolted together, and today the crew disassembled the red gantry.

But there is still a lot of work to do. The electrical connections of a modern press are incredibly complicated and time consuming to prepare and test. Over the next several weeks the technicians will be installing the peripheral units that contain the controls for the air movement systems, power systems, and dryer systems.

Inkers on Top

The installation has progressed to the placement of the inking units on top of the base cylinders. Here we are positioning the 6th inker unit over the press. Once again, we are dealing with precise alignment of big heavy objects.



Special care is taken as the inker is lowered into place to make sure the gears are correctly aligned with the gear of the impression cylinder.


The top gear in the next photo is the inker gear, and the bottom gear is the impression cylinder gear. If you look closely, you will see a red mark at the teeth of each gear (about "6 o'clock" on the top gear). This is the alignment point. Matching these points is critical to having correct gear timing throughout the press.


Note also the blue overalls worn by the KBA technician in the photo above. On my recent visits to Germany, I noticed that these are the fashionable workclothes for many of the tradesmen in Germany. I do not have a good explanation for why the blue color is universal, so if you know the story, let me hear it!

Tight Tolerances

With all the wonderful computer technology on our equipment, we could overlook the physical precision that is part of building a world class printing press. This picture is an attempt to convey some of the manufacturing and assembly skills at work.

What you see here is the joint between two of the six impression cylinder units that make up our new 81" press. Each unit weighs over 36,000 lbs, yet they must fit together exactly.

The picture below shows the start of placing the next unit in sequence. Using a gantry, big wrenches and some elbow grease, the technicians nudge and adjust the pieces until there is an exact fit. As you can tell from the size of the cylinder, moving these pieces around is a little more difficult than moving the sofa in the living room!

First base units on the pad

The KBA technicians have placed the first unit on the press foundation. What you see here is the impression cylinder at the feeder end of the press. Each unit is removed from its shipping container and carefully placed on the foundation. As a side note, the foundation is almost 4 feet deep and contains about 14 tons of steel reinforcement.

Heavy Metal arrives

The first trucks arrived in Niles on 9/5/2006 with our KBA 205 81" printing press . On the first day we had 10 trailers parked along the road. The size of the fork lift needed to unload the equipment gives you some idea of the loads involved. The base units for the KBA weigh between 35,000 and 38,000 lbs each. By the end of the day, three of the units were staged at the press pad and the rest were in our dock.