Alliance Press — Primed for Curing Success

Let's get a few things straight about Matt Edwards. The president of Knoxville, TN-based Alliance Press is ultimately focused on providing the best possible product that coldset web printing can provide. Period.

Secondly, in order to meet that end, Edwards is interested in fresh and innovative ideas. So when he attended a UV printing seminar held by Prime UV and Flint Ink a couple years ago at the Web Offset Association's (WOA) annual conference, Edwards found the best of both worlds—one that would launch the coldset printer into the realm of UV printing on coated and supercalendered stocks.

The result was a combination of Prime UV's PRIME Optimal NEWS four-lamp curing system and Flint Ink's Arrowlith UV ink for coldset web printing. Alliance Press served as a beta testing site for Flint's new ink product and rented the four-lamp system from Prime UV to do some testing of its own. The curing system was a cure-all for Alliance, which gave the green light and purchased a four-lamp system that was installed on the printer's Goss four-high (26 units) web press last August.

"Prime UV knew its equipment would cure a lot of different types of inks, so they weren't concerned," Edwards explains. "What we were concerned about was trying to find a way to make this work in the marketplace, in a fashion that would be feasible"

Founded in 1979, Alliance Press began life as a printer and publisher of community newspapers and grocery inserts. The publishing arm was discontinued as the company focused more on providing high quality coldset printing. Those core goals have been validated numerous times on a national level—Alliance Press and its staff of 35 employees have captured a pair of first place awards for four-color coldset work in the WOA's annual printing competition the last three years.

Alliance Press' products are primarily broadsheet, tabloid and signature formats. It serves the retail insert market, but also provides work for the weekly newspaper market, as well as the weekly and monthly trade publications/journals market for a number of industries. It churns out a strong amount of auto trader booklets, coupon booklets and higher education course listings.

But until recently, printing on coated and supercalendered stocks was something left to heatset web printers. It was a capabilities chip Edwards longed to boast and, with many customers gravitating toward using more coated stocks, it was becoming a necessity.

"We noticed that some of our customers were moving up to a heatset product, or combining heatset with our coldset work," Edwards notes. "Clients would combine a coated cover with their uncoated text, and then increasingly more and more pages turned to coated stocks. We asked ourselves if we wanted to invest in such a way to retain them, and that was one of our driving forces."

According to Elinor Midlik, president of Prime UV, the PRIME Optimal NEWS four-lamp curing system debuted in 2000 at a time when newspapers were not looking to make capital investments due to dismal advertising revenues. But Midlik started exploring the subsets of the newsprint market, those printers that produce community newspapers/weekly shoppers, auto traders, real estate guides and other giveaway products.

"These people were interested and committed to installing this technology," Midlik explains. "They especially wanted to do their own cover on a better grade of stock or a coated stock and, without a heatset oven on their presses, they couldn't do that."

Adding a heatset dryer was one alternative for Alliance Press. But a new oven with auxiliary equipment can run in the $400,000 range and brings other factors into the equation: air permits (burning off VOCs), gas, utilities and extra space. Edwards ran a cost estimate and found that going with UV inks and a curing system would be competitive with heatset.

"The UV inks are more expensive, but you get better mileage from them than you do with conventional inks," Edwards says.

Alliance Press customers like the results from UV ink curing, partly because it allows them to utilize the printer as a single-source vendor. From a product standpoint, Alliance is reaping quality advantages: UV means less offsetting, providing a cleaner sheet.

The result: Not only has Alliance Press created new business opportunities, it has expanded its workload for current customers. Plus, the threat of losing clients moving more toward using coated papers has been removed from the equation.

There is a learning curve involved. UV inks, for instance, do not contain the same ingredients as their traditional petroleum-based counterparts, thus the fountain solution is not the same. And since UV is laid down with considerably less water, Edwards says, there is more consistency in the results. Even so, elements such as learning what blankets help provide the best dot reproduction is part of the trial-and-error process.

Alliance is selling this capability on a "methodical basis," according to Edwards. "Every day we feel better about taking it to different market segments."