The Kansas City (Mo.) Star said it will install bender and conveyor systems from K&F International next year to complete the new plate production room at the $199 million production facility the newspaper is constructing downtown.

The newspaper (daily, 278,937; Sunday, 383,123) purchased five ProVision Alliance punch benders from K&F following the benders’ debut at Nexpo in Dallas last March. The newspaper also purchased pre- and post-bend conveyors, including a vertical post-bend plate conveyor system to direct plates to the press level mezzanine.  

“Because we’re using tower technology with new presses, the actual plate equipment is on the operating deck of the press,” said Randy Waters, vice president of production at The Star. “We decided to do this rather than have people run plates up and down (so) the press operators can just walk across the catwalk and pick them up.”

Only plates that need to be sent up to the two color cylinders located one level up on the press will travel via the vertical plate transport system.

The Star will deploy four Commander presses from Koenig & Bauer AG at the new production facility, with each press equipped with nine towers for a total of 54 couples, Waters said.

The new facility will enable The Star to attract commercial work, Waters said.

Commercial support

In addition to four computer-to-plate lines for which The Star is currently in negotiations, the newspaper ordered from K&F a Plate Express 3 conventional film-to-plate exposure unit, two BPF-400 blank plate feeders and the vendor’s Image Quality System, which automatically verifies the plate quality before the press.

“We want to have a film output device over there, just as a backup,” Waters said. “We do have a commercial print shop, we do send things out to commercial printers that will need to go out, possibly in the negative form if we can’t send electronic files.”

All CTP lines will produce plates to the middle of The Star’s new prepress production room. From there, the plates will meet in a central location to be identified by color and press location. After that, the plates will be sorted and stacked in six-page position collating stacker bins. The K&F plate conveyor systems will barcode read each plate and send the plate to the proper stacker on the same floor level, or vertically to stackers on the press level mezzanine.

Waters said The Star plans to be printing part of its product at the new production facility by January, and plans to be 100 percent up and running at the facility sometime in May.

The footprint of the ProVision Alliance is 33 percent smaller than the previous ProVision V-Series punch bender, according to K&F, and incorporates digitally controlled linear drives for the bend head and rotary leaf movements that form the plate.