News Corp Australia is looking for a home for the three manroland Geoman colour newspaper presses made redundant as a result of its sale of the Perth Sunday Times to Seven West Media.

The lightly-used German-built presses - all capable of at least 128 all-colour tabloid pages - are headed for the scrapyard unless a buyer comes forward. They could be a snip for a publisher in North America, India or elsewhere, looking for a low-cost way to increase colour content or capacity.

Operations managing director Geoff Booth says that if a buyer isn't found, the presses will be cannibalised for "hot spares"... and scrapped. Parts from the Reliance control systems are in demand to keep News' presses in Melbourne and Adelaide going.

But despite the fact that it has older equipment at these sites, there is no future for the Perth Print presses in the east: "The equipment will be scrapped minus some hot spares we will remove, and site decommissioned and eventually sold," Booth says.

West Australian Newspapers - which has bought the Sunday Times from News - moved production next week to its own KBA-equipped plant at Osborne Park, and will also print the WA edition of The Australian under contract, pus the balance of the jointly-owned Community Newspapers titles.

Dating to 1990, the three Geoman presses all have a 1728 web width and 578 cut-off, with Reliance control systems. One has four eight-couple towers, one four-couple tower, and two folders (2:5:5 and 2:3:3), with upper formers and turner bars, and cylinder stitching, to print 128 pages of back-to-back colour and 16 pages of mono.

The other two presses each have four eight-couple towers and a 2:3:3 folder, with and turner bars and cylinder stitching to produce 128 pages of back-to-back colour. There are a total of 17 CD paster reelstands, six technotrans dampening units, and five FMC AGV reel handling vehicles.

Also on offer are the two Ferag ETR-M inserting lines with Rotodisc winding systems and ABL stacking lines. Contact Geoff Booth if you are interested, and please mention GXpress.

Fairfax Media last year scrapped two Geoman and five slightly-older Colorman presses and related mailroom equipment from its Melbourne and Sydney print sites after relocating some equipment to North Richmond, Ballarat and Petone.