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S Chand and Company installs KBA Rapida 105

May 01, 2004

One of the leading school and college textbook publishers in the country owning more than 6500 titles continue their modernisation program with the recent installation of a KBA Rapida 4-colour sheet fed press. Ravindra Gupta the Chairman and Managing Director of S Chand has spent more than Rs. 15 crore in a modernisation program over the last several years. S Chand already had three 4-colour presses but the addition of the new Rapida 105 has given the publisher the highest quality sheetfed multicolour printing capacity of any book publisher in the country. S Chand print only their own titles and these, right from the famous Wren and Martin grammar book to 1300 page college biology textbooks are being transformed into full four colour process books. The company’s plan is to increasingly produce all its titles with full colour illustration and images. The company publishes 150 new titles each year and altogether five tiles are published each day of the year.

Ravindra Gupta, Managing Director, S Chand and Company

Rapida 105
The Rapida 105, like all KBA multicolour sheetfed presses has a high pile feeder and delivery as standard. The remarkable electronic feeder is shaftless with four individual stepless motors for the lifting and paper movement functions. It can be set to pick up the last single sheet from the palette. The 105 cm size, just a little bigger than most of the presses in the 102-105 cm range, is also attractive to book printers. An important option for fast throughput of some of the book papers used by S Chand is a very effective dust suction device on the infeed. The universal grippers on the press need no adjustments for different types of paper or varying bulk and thickness. The automatic setup of the feeder and the delivery can be pipelined for a series of print orders.

The Rapida’s single train fast response ink feed is designed for process stability. The dampening system has a chilling and circulation system for alcohol replenishment, and a differential drive for the ink and dampening form roller relative to the plate. This creates a wipe effect on the plate and prevents hickies. S Chand’s 105 also has an infrared dryer with adjustable radiation levels and footprints that can be varied according to the sheet size and ink film.

The press control console contains a personal computer that runs the control software including remote inking and registration and apart from an Ethernet connection for remote diagnostics, a floppy drive and a DVD drive are provided for taking data off-line and for software updates. There is a built in UPS in the console and the press contains all the other automation devices and bells and whistles such as the plate changer and blanket and impression cylinder washers.

Orient web and Muller Martini Ventura and Inventa Plus
Although already huge, S Chand is continuously enhancing its book printing and postpress capacities. Just as the Rapida is the fourth 4-colour sheetfed press, a sixth web is being installed, an Orient with a 508 mm cut-off capable of 2+2 or 4-colour printing. In addition to its numerous Polygraph and Guk folders, its Seypa guillotines, its Sulby perfect binder and a couple of 3-knife trimmers, the company has recently added a gathering machine from local manufacturer Pramod Engineering, a Taigra section sewing machine, and an Inventa Plus perfect binder from Muller Martini. The Taigra is especially impressive with its capacity of automatically sewing 12000 sections or signatures an hour.

S Chand and Company was founded by Sultan Chand in 1937 and the company has been run by the founders grandnephew Ravindra Gupta, since 2000. The massive modernisation drive that is taking place is an effort to consolidate the intellectual value of the company’s 6500 titles by adding new scientific and technical titles with all the advantages of full colour illustration. At the same time the old single colour and two colour titles are being continuously revised and renewed with a comprehensive design makeover for full colour production.