Stephan Wellnitz checks whether the cutting edge fulfils the requirements. The paper roll leaves the preparation station with a precisely applied strip of tesa EasySplice®.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. While the city sleeps, there is great hustle and bustle behind the giant doors of an offset printing plant in the small town of Ahrensburg in northern Germany. 310,000 copies of the daily newspaper “Hamburger Abendblatt” are loaded onto waiting trucks, to make their way across the country. On weekdays, 90,000 copies of “Die Welt” as well as up to 170,000 copies of the national edition and 360,000 copies of the Hamburg edition of daily paper “Bild” are run off. Just a few hours later the hot-off-the-presses media accompany innumerable people in greeting their day.

One of them is Maximilian Ziemann: “Mornings during breakfast, I peruse my paper – usually reading about the football match I saw live on TV the night before. I find the timeliness, speed and logistics of this business absolutely fascinating.” Unlike most other readers, this 47-year-old knows a lot about the technical processes that go on behind the scenes at the printing plant. As market manager of tesa SE, the customer requirements of the printing industry are part of his everyday life.

A constant temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius is maintained at the 4,280 square meter preparation hall in the plant. A light misting from above generates a relative humidity of about 55 percent – the optimum conditions for the giant rolls of paper. Robots that look like small forklifts are navigated via radio and laser, and move independently to transport the weighty newsprint rolls through the hall and gently place the them in one of the stations for splicing. With a quiet purring sound, the machine applies a strip of tesa EasySplice® for a flying reel change while printing is in progress. A clean cut and a short time later it continues on its way toward the printing machines.

 

While it would be hard to believe during these procedures that there is such a thing as being slow, thin paper must withstand almost unbelievable speeds in the later manufacturing process. It is crucial that the adhesive strip is correctly applied so that the paper does not rip during a fully automated roll change, “When our printing machines are producing at full speed, the paper is subjected to forces that equal a wind force seven.

Our preparation work must be very clean. Otherwise, we risk losing everything,” explains Stephan Wellnitz, who is responsible for optimum workflow as printing engineer in the “Rotary Printing” department. When all machines are running at full speed, the offset printing plant in Ahrensburg prints about 300,000 newspapers per hour. This corresponds to the processing of about 13.4 metres of paper per second per machine.

“Each day the printing plant processes 200 to 250 rolls of paper at a value of 500 euro per roll. Last year, our totals reached about 75,000 tons of paper. In comparison, a small printing plant only uses about 2,000 tons,” says the 33-year-old professional printer and graduate engineer in printing technology, who as a customer of tesa SE is in direct contact with sales representative Hans-Dieter Lorenz. “It has been six years since tesa launched EasySplice® products on the market for newspaper printing. A lot has changed since then,” says the 51-year-old. “In those days, the paper rolls had to be taped by hand. Now, everything is fully automated. Our task was to make adhesive tapes that were suitable for use with robots.”

The success of tesa EasySplice® Robotic in Ahrensburg is one of the reasons that newspaper printing for Axel Springer Verlag works practically trouble-free. “This development is due to close collaboration between the printing plant, the printing machine manufacturer MAN and tesa. For technical purposes, we dealt with a prototype. In such a situation, all parties find themselves in a continual learning process.

We were repeatedly on site, gauged results and optimised systems until everything worked perfectly,” explains Hans-Dieter Lorenz. In this way, tesa played an important role in helping Offset Printing Plant Ahrensburg set new standards for modern newspaper printing with an error rate of less than one percent.