Daifuku, has completed a project to design and install two high bay stacker cranes at Trinity Mirror’s Oldham print works.
The facility not only produces The Daily Mirror, but also prints titles such as The Manchester Evening News and Daily Mail regionally for other publishers. Additional capacity is also required in early 2018 to accommodate work for the Guardian Media Group.
The double mast cranes handle three different sizes of paper reels, which are delivered daily from paper suppliers in the UK, Scandinavia and even Russia.
Robert Wood, business development manager at Daifuku Europe, said: “The first challenge for our UK engineering team was to create a set of CAD drawings for the existing installation, as only paper copies existed from the original installation. The drawings were checked meticulously by the Daifuku engineering department in Japan, before we set to work designing the dual-masted crane. This system provides ultimate performance and reliability for this type of application and required an extension to the existing framework.
“Having to operate in a highly confined space, where existing lighting and other infrastructure such as sprinkler systems and conveyor systems needed consideration, was a real challenge.”
The Daifuku system replaces the original cranes, which were installed in 1989 and were suffering from metal fatigue and obsolescence issues, making spare parts hard to find.
