Dekalb, Ill – It’s 2AM, and PN’s nocturnal enthusiasm is rolling at 15,000 to 18,000 copies an hour. Two months ago, the third shift at Castle Printech taught PN their printing origami.
When PN was conceived in 2000, it searched high and low for a printer. It first looked to Minuteman Press, and toward the end of a long enthusiastic meeting, Ray Kinney of MMP said, “Naperville doesn’t have a web press!”
Positively Naperville was first printed in Aurora on the Naperville Sun’s old press that used to be housed on Ogden, nestled between several car dealerships before it was moved to Aurora. After many years of service for local readers, the tired, temperamental press was retired. In 2008 PN moved to a press in Dekalb.
Castle Printech in Dekalb prints many northern Illinois independent newspapers, including NIU’s student paper. From the Quad Cities to Rockford to Naperville, many Midwesterners have read a printed page from PN’s favorite web press.
The web press stands two stories short and extends more than a length of a basketball court. It’s industrially independent and steadfastly noisy. It’s a reminder of American ingenuity and dexterity. How it was engineered will always be an origami puzzle.
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The growth of web printing for books, newspapers, magazines, business forms, etc., has made the process a major part of the printing industry for nearly two hundred years, in one variation or the other.
Though typesetters have become obsolete, setup has evolved to a computer. Page designers set text on a computer, export it to a PDF, and email it to the printer. The PDFs are extracted to a metal plate, where they then are set on rollers.
Web printing refers to the printing on a large continuous roll of paper rather than printing on individual sheets as a sheetfed press does. (Mintuteman Press in Naperville has sheetfed presses.) Basically, there are two types of web presses.
First there’s the heatset web. Heat dries the ink. By contrast, with the coldset web, the ink dries by air and absorption. It’s considered blanket to impression and only prints one side at a time.
The web press is similar to the sheetfed press in that it contains an infeed section, printing units and delivery section. However, because the web prints from humongous rolls, the various sections are different from those used on a sheetfed press.
The colossal paper rolls are loaded and set. The rolls can be nearly 50 inches wide, though after the paper is cut and trimmed PN is 11.5 inches wide by 13.5 inches tall. Rolls are stitched (taped) together so the webpress doesn’t stop.
The ink is scraped with a putty knife and loaded. The ink comes in a 5-gallon bucket, just like commercial paint. Individuals with a home printer may have noticed the acronym CKMY – Cyan, blacK, Magenta, and Yellow – are the four colors used in color printing. Theoretically, the three primary colors can be mixed to create any color.
Rollers distribute ink evenly on the plate, then it’s pressed into the paper.
The printing process is constantly checked at the computerized control panel. The press foreman checks the alignment, speed and the overall ink quality. He has several magnifying glasses to check the ink quality.
After running the length of the press, the paper is trimmed, folded and put into proper order. It is bundled, placed on a pallet and now ready for early morning delivery.
And in case you still are wondering, the web press has absolutely nothing to do with the World Wide Web, or “web” for short, that you find on the Internet. Fact is, sources say there are more than 40 billion public web pages on the Web today. That’s would be lot of newsprint4.
Thanks for reading our independent publication, printed monthly; yet, digital daily.
Thanks PRINTERS for all your hard work!
