Walton Press Purchases New RMGT 970 Long Perfector at drupa 2024

RMGT 970 8-color Perfector press | Credit: Graphco/RMGT

Graphco, the Exclusive Distributor for RMGT’s most popular 970, 920 and 790 offset presses throughout the Midwest and Southeast, is please to announce that an 8-UP+ RMGT 970PF-8+LED Long Perfector has been purchased by Monroe, GA based Walton Press. Scheduled for delivery in late July, this 38-inch press which features ASAP (Autonomous Smart Assist Printing) and LED instant-curing technology, will be showcased running live demonstration on the RMGT stand for the 11 days of drupa, the massive Global trade fair held every four years in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The 124-year-old company has roots planted firmly in long-run, heat-set and cold-set web-offset presses that produce in the range of 35,000 copies per hour. For smaller, lower-volume printing jobs, Walton Press has been using a top-of-the-line digital press for several years. However, as the demand for more short-run work continues to increase, technological limitations have impeded productivity. The ability to gang-run jobs is an attractive benefit of the RMGT. “We can run four up on a 25-by-38-inch sheet, compared to only one up now on our digital size sheet,” states Stuart Christian, President of Walton Press, sounding like a kid in a candy shop. “That’s a huge twist since our cost study shows runs as short as 500 sheets are actually produced on the new press more cost-effectively than on our digital.”

“We are excited to get back to offset for shorter print volumes, and of course at 15,000 4/4 sheets per hour the new RMGT meets our medium run length print volume as well,” declares Christian. Situated 45 miles east of Atlanta, the printing firm employs 100 full-time employees who produce a variety of magazines: from newsprint weeklies, such as the Atlanta Business Chronicle (circulation: 23,000), to glossy community titles like Simply Buckhead, an upscale, 96-page lifestyle publication for the ATL metro area (24,000 copies printed eight times per year). Walton operates two to three shifts, five days per week, in its 70,000-square-foot facility. “We run three shifts as needed, and our book of business has been quite large since the end of the pandemic,” Christian reports.

The management team considered investing in another heat-set web press, or a newer model ink-jet device, but decided against both options. The pushback on digital printing was easy to justify, according to Christian, who has been at Walton’s helm for nine years: “Walton Press has reached a pivot point between our high-quality web press [Manroland ROTOMAN] and the digital press [Kodak NexPress] that we are selling.

We feel the sheetfed offset from RMGT will take the [shorter] volumes at a much better price point,” he concludes. “We will also be much more competitive on runs under 20,000 with the sheetfed perfector speeding along at 15,000 sph [sheets per hour], printing double-sided. Ink jet would never meet our customer’s quality expectations, and of course the lower cost of equipment, consumables and traditional paper stock made the RMGT offset solution very attractive.”

In addition, Walton Press just upgraded their bindery with new high-speed saddle binders and perfect binders that will will use the same signature formats that their webs produce.  This is another huge advantage to RMGT’s traditional 16-page, 32-page signature format in comparison with ink-jet which typically requires huge additional investments in non-traditional finishing equipment that is typically captive to the short lifespan ink jet machines.

Less paper and more work

Walton Press has opted to add a Quantum Design QRS-106 roll-to-sheet converter to its RMGT sheetfed press. “Adding the roll sheeter just makes sense for us to be able to use the same paper stock, which we buy a lot of now,” explains Christian. With the 970PF, “we also can vary the cutoffs, which we cannot do now,” he adds. The new machine will provide in-house equipment redundancy, “giving us more control to meet customer deadlines,” he says of production support.

The same model RMGT 970PF-8+LED press being exhibited at the PRINTING United Expo last fall in Atlanta caught the attention of Patrick Judge, Walton’s Managing Director of Operations. “It was the only sheetfed press I saw at the show and it really caught our attention,” he recalls. Due to the quick job turnarounds that are rapidly growing within their heat-set-web workflow, he was particularly interested in the LED instant curing component, which is essential to avoid bindery bottlenecks. Plus, the two energy-efficient, LED lamps draw only 75 amps of power in comparison to the Rotoman’s long heat-set tunnel. Faster makeready start-ups are another lure. “Right now, changeovers are our biggest setback,” Judge notes, “causing us to slow down production. And with the new press, we won’t be losing 500 sheets to get up to color.”

Analyzing the numbers, he estimates that Walton will save literally hundreds of tons of paper annually with the new 970PF-8+LED. “We expect to cut waste astronomically,” he says. Obviously, trucking in far fewer tractor-trailer loads of paper is huge from a sustainability standpoint. While acknowledging the RMGT’s attractive price point, Judge adds that substantial paper-waste savings enhance the return-on-investment (ROI) proposition for the new press.

Christian is confident that expanding the firm’s capabilities with the new 38” 4/4 long perfector will attract other types of customers and titles to Walton Press. “We’d like to expand our [product] line-up to include higher quality catalogs and magazines,” he shares, as well as organically enter new markets. For example, Walton presently outsources magazine components, such as inserts. “With this new press, we’ll be able to print and coat a couple hundred thousand high-quality inserts, in different versions, in-house every month rather than outsourcing. In addition, it can handle DAL [direct address label] cards for publishers,” he notes. These products represent entirely new revenue channels for the print service provider.

To help meet Walton customers’ demanding quality expectations, the RMGT pressat drupa is demonstrating Autonomous Smart Assist Printing (ASAP), which deploys two cameras to control color, adjust registration and fully inspect every sheet. “This highly intelligent ASAP technology is becoming mainstream as we are now placing these intelligent cameras on many of our customer’s new presses,” believes Chris Manley, President of Graphco. “It brings the ability to evaluate every sheet, and then any non-compliant sheets containing even minute imperfections as small as 1 mm are removed them from the rest of the run.  This goes for color fidelity as well, with a Delta E of .01 as the standard.” Judge likens such intense, quality-assurance measures to those seen on the high-speed, roll-to-roll flexographic presses that he employed earlier in his career.

“Graphco is honored to again partner with such a well-established and highly respected company like Walton Press.  As we approach our 50^th year in business I am more in awe than ever of companies like Walton at 124 years, and Advertisers Printing at 100 years young.  Let’s face it, that’s a lot of payrolls to make in a row,” observes Manley, “And for this press to mark our second RMGT Long Perfector to include our roll-to-sheet device tells me that properly done offset printing for publication houses, and other web offset concerns, has a very long runway for sure.  And no one can dispute the higher quality and lower cost of this technology versus inkjet, and web printers are accustomed to buying machines that last, so our incredibly durable RMGT platform is a big positive.  We are excited to see this pressrunning live in Dusseldorf, and then making its home back in Monroe, Georgia.”

Source: Graphco