In 2003 the Krehbiel Mitsubishi press is about 3 years old, but it is still a state-of-the-art machine in terms of speed and quality. It is extremely fast and its print quality probably equals the quality of sheetfed presses. (Conventional wisdom is that sheetfed presses provide better quality, but presses like the Mitsubishi have closed the gap.) The press cost about $10 million dollars.

In book manufacturing the printing press normally prints 16 pages in a pass (8 pages on each side of the sheet). The pages are arranged in a way so that the 16-page section has the correct ordering when the sheet is folded into a booklet. The 16-page section is called a signature. If you look at many hard-cover books, you can see that the book is composed of numerous signatures that are assembled together.

The Mitsubishi press prints two signatures on one pass through the machine.

At the end of the press is a large machine that cuts the continuous roll of printed paper into sections and folds the sections into the signature booklets.

The signature booklets come out of the machine on conveyer belts and are gathered up into bundles for the next step in the manufacturing process.

This is a plate for the printing press for printing Houston Freeways. The plate is made out of aluminum and has a pattern burned into it to place ink on the paper.

This view shows the plates lined up along the four sections of the printing press. Each section places one layer of ink on the paper. The first section applies black, the second applies cyan, the third applies magenta, and the fourth applies yellow.

This is a plate bending machine that bends the edges of the plates so they will load into the printing press.

This view shows a plate in position to be loaded.

The pressman works on the plate loading. The Mitsubishi has a very short make-ready time (the time required to install new plates and get the machine running again.) The short make-ready time is one of the reasons Krehbiel is very cost-competitive in printing a large color book.

The plate is wrapped around a cylinder in the printing press. As it rotates in applies ink to the sheet. (Note that the plate does not apply ink directly to the paper, there are intermediate ink transfer devices.) In this view you can see the image on page 284, the portrait of R.E. "Bob" Smith.

This is the roll of paper, known as the "web" in the printing industry.

Houston Freeways is printed on MeadWestvaco Sterling Ultra Matte 70 lb (105 g/sqm) paper. This is a coated paper, which provides good image reproduction. Images usually print best on glossy paper, but I chose to use a matte finish paper because the book has a lot of text and text on glossy paper can be difficult to read due to light reflection.

After the ink is applied and the sheet passes through a heating unit to dry the ink, the paper traverses through these rollers before entering the cutting and folding machine.

After the ink is applied, the continuous sheet enters this machine for cutting and folding.

Here I am at the top of the cutting and folding unit. I'm surprised the photo was able to show the printed sheet as non-blurred since it was moving incredibly fast.

This is the view looking down from the top of the cutting and folding unit. Since the Mitsubishi prints two 16-page signatures in a single pass, there are two conveyors exiting the unit.

That's me looking at a signature.

The signatures go along this conveyor to a collecting unit.

After the signatures are collected they are bundled up as shown above before proceeding to the next step in the process.

Continue to printing the cover