Muller Martini's new NewsGrip F gripper conveyor transports almost 30 billion printed pages, weighing a total of over 40,000 tons, a year at the site of one of its very first users, and recently set two world speed records there.
The figures of the Kraft-Schlötels printing plant, which belongs to German WKS Druckholding Group, are impressive in every respect. The group as a whole prints some 200,000 tons of paper each year. More than 40,000 tons of those are produced by the world's largest illustration printing press, a 160-page Lithoman IV with a length of 70 meters, height of 17 meters and width of 20 meters, which was installed two years ago. The machine, which allows processing paper with a total width of up to 4.5 meters, produces 1,000 printed pages a second on annual average. Those incredible volumes of paper, however, also need to be conveyed efficiently.
As part of a total package with cooperation partner RIMA Systems, Muller Martini supplied the News Grip F, currently the fastest single-gripper conveyor in the market. It collects the front-trimmed products from the printing press at a speed of up to 100,000 copies an hour with 1:1 pick-up and conveys them first to the head and foot trimmer and then to the compensating stacker and palletizer. "At the time of planning the new printing press, there wasn't a chain available for the performance we required," says Dr. Ralph Dittmann, Managing Director of WKS Group. "However, we knew that Muller Martini was working on a new solution, the NewsGrip F, which resulted in a strong development partnership. I was entirely confident that if Muller Martini believed that it could meet the extremely high requirements of our machine, then it would succeed."
The Muller Martini chain conveys almost 30 billion printed pages a year. That means it covered a distance of over 50,000 kilometers over the past twelve months – the equivalent of traveling more than once around the entire world! It even broke two world speed records in the process. First, the machine achieved a net output of 188,000 copies per hour with a 48-page product in four-up production, producing more than nine million printed pages an hour. It then went on to produce more than 500,000 copies an hour in twelve-up production.
WKS Druckholding has never failed to produce a job on time, no matter how extensive the work or at what short notice it was ordered. Despite operating non-stop every day of the week, its vast capacities are fully utilized by production for its customers, which are predominantly based in Germany.
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