Gravure – the giant is coming back: Print 21 magazine article

As far as publication gravure is concerned, Australia has not bothered with it since the early 1980s when Kerry Packer’s Conpress closed. With the announcement of a greenfield three press gravure plant to be built in Sydney by IPMG, Andy McCourt looks at the implications, reasons and technology, and rejoices in the return of the word ‘HelioKlischograph’.

Does size matter? I’m talking presses here! Why, after almost 30 years of blissful offset litho magazine and catalogue production, would a perfectly sane and rational media group opt for three mighty rotogravure web presses when Australia’s print runs are so much shorter, we presume, than those of Asia, Europe and the USA?

Of course, it’s never over until the well-proportioned lady sings, as movie-supremo Sam Goldwyn once observed; but plans are well afoot, with a detailed submission currently in front of the NSW Department of Planning. The former Kimberly-Clark paper converting plant at Warwick Farm near Liverpool is slated to become one of the most productive printing plants in the Southern Hemisphere. How productive? Try 1.2 billion A4 pages per week, or the equivalent thereof.

Yes, billion. To digest this, let’s say there are around 150 major magazine titles in Australia. They are not all weeklies of course but if they were and average pages were, say, 200 with an average circulation of 40,000, that would be 1.2 billion pages a week. One press site could print the lot. The analogy gets more interesting when you add catalogues, tax packs, newspaper-inserted magazines, annual reports and longer run magazines.

Cylinder magic
The cylinder width is stated to be 3,200mm in the plans - 3.2 metres of steel, copper and chrome cylinders engraved with 120 pages, sucking ink onto a web moving at 16 metres a second. It’s the ability to manufacture these cylinders that is the critical part of any gravure operation. Back in the 70s, they were chemically etched releasing some very toxic substances such as potassium cyanide.
 
Today, virtually all publication gravure cylinders are engraved with diamond or laser heads to deliver cells of the exact width and depth required. Gravure delivers more ink to the paper so, if you want more density, the cell for that area is deeper.

Hell Gravure systems – the last remaining part of the old Dr Rudolph Hell prepress organisation (the rest was swallowed up by Heidelberg) - is a world leader with its HelioKlischograph cylinder engravers used for both packaging and publication gravure. Other manufacturers include Max Daetwyler (who bought up the US Schepers company), Think Labs of Japan and Dainippon Screen. The cylinders can be re-used up to ten times, with the engraving ground off, the copper layer re-applied and then chrome plated for hardness after re-engraving.
 
This requires a production line of the type manufactured by Kaspar Walter, a Munich-based company working closely with Hell Gravure.

Gravure cylinders once cost many thousands of dollars each – one reason why only very long print runs were printed by this process. Today, 3.2 metre cylinders can probably be made ready for press for around $1,500-$2,000. It’s the cylinder process, together with automation, that has made gravure viable for shorter runs. When coupled with better colour, the ability to use thinner paper, massive productivity and the vastly improved environmental aspects of gravure, it’s easy to see why a high-volume printer such as IPMG has decided to bring it back.

But what presses?
The choice of press for a publication-width gravure printer is very limited. Since 2007, when KBA sold all of its gravure intellectual properties to Officine Meccaniche Giovanni Cerutti S.p.A, this outstanding Italian company has virtually cornered the world market. All of Europe’s mighty rotogravure printers employ Cerutti/KBA presses.

Cerutti, based in the far north of Italy, is still run by the Cerutti family with a woman – Madame Tere Cerutti – at the head. Her late husband, Luigi, built on the innovation of the founder Giovanni and their son, Giancarlo, is president and CEO. The company manufactures flexographic and die-cutting equipment as well and is largely responsible for the resurgence of rotogravure on the world graphic arts stage.

But how does gravure stack up environmentally? In today’s world, very well indeed. A giant gravure site in the UK owned by Prinovis, houses three 4.32 metre presses and prints 160,000 tonnes of paper a year. It does all this with zero emissions, every drop of fugitive toluene (gravure ink’s main solvent) is recovered and re-used. We can expect Warwick Farm to employ similar solvent recovery methods.

With better colour, greater productivity and lower costs, gravure’s re-entry into the Australian graphic arts scene will make print media more attractive and competitive against other media. It’s great to see it coming back and, although it will most likely be the only publication gravure site to be built, it raises the image of our industry and truly puts us ‘up there’ with the print powerhouses of the world.

Roll on 2010, and well done IPMG.