Japan’s Magazine Production Gets ‘In-Line’

PRINT, package, and ship 3.5 million copies of the Watchtower and Awake! magazines each month: That is one of the jobs the Japan branch of the Watch Tower Society must perform in order to meet the needs of Jehovah’s Witnesses in doing their preaching work in Japan and a number of other countries in the Far East. Obviously, efficiency is the key.

To meet this need, the Witnesses in Japan designed and, for the most part, built a conveyor system that eliminates most of the time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks, such as having to stack and unstack the magazines at various stages of the production process.

To start with, the only equipment available commercially was the rotary press, with its stacking attachment, and the three-knife trimmer that cuts the magazines to size. The Witnesses went to work and came up with a system linking these two units and other custom-made devices, so that it is possible to print, stack, trim, and package the magazines in one operation.

A Run-Through of the System

Looking at the pictures in the proper sequence will give you a good idea of how the ‘in-line’ system works. To begin with, paper from two rolls enters the rotary press (picture A) at speeds of up to 25 feet (8 m) per second. Out of the other end of the press (B) come two continuous streams of beautiful four-color magazines, about a thousand copies a minute. The roller conveyors send the magazines to the stacking machine (C), which sorts them into fluffy piles of 50 magazines each.

The stacks of magazines are then sent to the hydraulic pressing unit (D), which applies up to 50 tons of pressure for two seconds to each stack to squeeze out the air between the pages. This step alone eliminates all the work involved in having to take the magazines off the conveyors, stack them on pallets under pressure overnight, and then reload or feed them to the trimmer in bundles of 50, one bundle at a time by hand.

After being pressed, the two streams of magazines are merged into one and then sent on to the trimmer (E), which cuts the magazines to size. The conveyor belt takes the magazines, now nicely trimmed and compacted, to the custom-made packing station (F), where they are put into cartons, which are sealed and then labeled by computer, ready to be wheeled right onto trucks waiting in the truck docks.

Efficient Use of Resources

Is all this elaborate equipment really necessary? “If we were to handle the present work load under the former arrangement,” said Yasuyuki, the overseer of the entire operation, “we would need to add at least ten workers to the crew. And that is if we could find the space to store all those magazines in the process.” With this ‘in-line’ system, 11 operators working as a team can process 54,000 magazines an hour. It is easy to see why Witnesses at the branch are overjoyed that Japan’s magazine production got ‘in-line.’

[Pictures on page 20, 21]

A. Rotary press

B. Magazines from press

C. Conveyor to stacker

D. Hydraulic pressing unit

E. Trimmer

F. Packing station