Newspaper & Mailroom

Harland Simon shows experience is the best teacher…

Friday 17. December 2010 - This year The Huntsville Times, AL celebrated its 100th anniversary. In celebration, a special edition chronicling the past century was printed.

In 1915, five years after the first edition hit the streets, the men operating the Linotype probably hadn’t heard of the recently founded Harland Engineering Company. But 95 years on the team responsible for printing that commemorative edition have been working closely with Harland Simon to pave the way for a 125th anniversary publication.
The Times were experiencing major issues with their ToyoDenki press drive system installed on their late 80’s TKS press, which presented a potential risk to production. Others had been to look at the issues without success; Harland Simon was able to offer a creative solution.
Drive systems are nothing new to Harland Simon, since the companies inception they designed and built their own drives and pioneered such technologies as the first fully shaftless color add on unit in the mid 80’s using transistor drive technology and subsequently pioneered some of the first shaftless press drive systems. In fact, drives are what led HS into the Newspaper industry 40 years ago, and they built on this success and sturdy reputation by designing full control systems for which they are now also world renowned.
After an initial visit and a period of consultation Harland Simon dispatched one of their most experienced drive engineers to test a range of solutions designed to find an economic solution to Huntsville’s problems. This was a highly unusual drive system and to the best of anyone’s knowledge the only one of its type in North America.
This testing visit was conducted with no interruption to production and was performed free of charge. The results of which proved to both The Huntsville Times and Harland Simon that a number of economically viable, technically correct solutions were possible; After consideration Frank Maier, Operations Director, and his team decided to make the full investment at one time and replace all 11 drives and to provide 2 masters one to act as a live back up, again with no interruption to production.
Charlie Brackley, Sales Manager for Harland Simon commented, “Our team is excited to start work on this project, they have worked with the crew in Huntsville to design a solution to this unusual system and are looking forward to putting into practice.’