The Christchurch Print Centre produces two broadsheet dailies: The Press and The Timaru Herald. In addition to these two daily products, the site also produces twelve community sheets in tabloid format, some of which appear bi-weekly. “We print for the whole of South Island, from Nelson and Blenheim in the north to Invercargill at the southern tip,” explains Raja Chakrabarti, operations manager of Fairfax Media Print and Logistics in Christchurch. The three Fairfax printing plants in New Zealand – Christchurch, Nelson and Petone/Wellington – produce a total of 90 titles that add up to around 200 million copies per year.

New: Streamfold and polybagging
The press installed at CPC is a Goss Uniliner with a ground-floor design and reel stands at a 90-degree angle to the press to allow variable web widths. It was commissioned in 2009 and equipped with a second folder. Up to now, the downstream mailroom basically consisted of an MSD2C inserting drum, a RollStream with seven hoppers and two MultiStack compensating stackers. The Print Centre has now been expanded with additional modules from another location as part of Fairfax’s printing plant restructuring. Ferag supplied an additional StreamFold and polybagging section that also offers the possibility of online triple folding and film packaging of products or product bundles. Raja Chakrabarti: “There are a number of commercial jobs in our portfolio that we produce in various formats. Those commercial products include two real estate titles (South Canterbury Property and Mark Stevenson's Real Estate) as well as an agricultural title (NZ Farmer), all of them saddle stitched. Two more titles – Your Weekend and Ag Trader – are stitched and trimmed. The new Ferag StreamFold line comes into play for all products with a suitable format that require subsequent film packaging. Because copies of the Press and Timaru Herald delivered to subscribers are film-wrapped as protection against the weather, these subscription dailies also run through the StreamFold line. This is done partly online, partly offline and allows parallel delivery of subscription and kiosk copies.

Winding stations enable offline production
New to CPC’s mailroom are several MultiDisc winding and unwinding stations that were moved to Christchurch from another location. For the first time, they allow automated offline production in postpress. To this end, the inserting drum was rebuilt to be fed either from the RollStream or the preprint unwinding station. The universal transporters in the mailroom have been rearranged and now bring a very high degree of flexibility to how production can be organised. In view of the additional production possibilities, Ferag supplied a third new MultiStack compensating stacker for the bundling area at the end of the processing line, thus adding appreciably to performance capability. The project has now been wrapped up and, according to Raja Chakrabarti, was “very professionally handled.” Right from the start, there was openness to suggestions from Ferag that were also followed through – both in terms of improving efficiency as well as general health and safety conditions. In Chakrabarti’s view, by far the biggest challenge was re-situating the inserting drum within one week.

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