The job was at Gebr. Knauer in Dettingen an der Erms. They had bought a brand-new large-format Planeta Varimat, Format 8, six colors plus coater. By the time I arrived, the mechanical crew had already been there for two or three weeks. Peter Jonas and Edwin Steiger—both mechanics and coworkers I had known for years—were deep into the installation. My part was the electrical work and commissioning.
The new press
If you entered the building and took an immediate right, you approached the feeder. From there the press ran down the building through six printing units and the coater to the delivery.
Just beyond the delivery sat a laminating machine. It was close—too close, as it turned out. Eventually it had to be moved so the Varimat could be operated properly, but during installation that was not yet much of a problem.
The laminator was part of Knauer’s packaging operation. Printed sheets were produced separately and then laminated onto corrugated board to make strong printed packaging.
Three days at the delivery
The reason I spent so much time at the delivery was VARIDAMP. The dampening system was a retrofit, installed on all six printing units, and the associated panels and wiring kept me stationed around the delivery for roughly three days.
Much of that time I was literally sitting on top of the delivery doing wiring.
From there I had a very good view of the laminating machine below.
Maria worked there with another woman. Her job was Anlegerin: manually placing and aligning the printed sheet so it could be glued accurately onto the corrugated board. Pure manual labor, one sheet after another.
Maria came from an Italian family but had been born in Germany. She spoke German with a Swabian accent. She was divorced and had a son of about eight.
I thought she was very attractive. Then I went back to work.
The parking spot
I had driven my red Corvette to Dettingen and, as usual, I liked having the car close by.
Most of the proper parking spaces seemed to be occupied by employees who had their accustomed places. Right beside the entrance was an open area where nobody parked. It was convenient, it was close, and nobody complained.
So I used it.
It was not really an official parking space.
That distinction became more important after work one day when I got into the Corvette, turned the key, and the engine cranked perfectly—but refused to start.
Crank, fuel, no spark
The engine was cranking, so the starter and battery were not the problem. Fuel was easy to verify. The Corvette had a Holley four-barrel double-pumper, and I could look straight into it and see that plenty of fuel was being delivered.
That left ignition.
No spark.
The car used GM’s HEI—High Energy Ignition—system. The coil was built into the distributor, making the whole ignition package compact and convenient.
The failure was inside the coil connection to the center high-voltage contact feeding the distributor rotor. The internal wire had come loose. The contact was no longer conducting, and it was not something I could repair properly there.
I needed a replacement HEI coil.
Meanwhile the Corvette was sitting beside the customer’s entrance. It was not stopping trucks or blocking the whole plant, but pedestrians had to work around it.
I also needed the car to get back to the hotel.
So, for a while, the Planeta stopped being my first troubleshooting priority.
My own machine came first.
The Stuttgart parts hunt
Peter Jonas had a rental car, so I borrowed it and spent roughly half a day looking for the correct American ignition part.
I finally found the HEI coil at KTS American Car Parts in the Stuttgart area, drove back to Dettingen, fitted it, and the Corvette came back to life.
The car had been in the way for perhaps a day and a half—two days at the absolute most.
Then it moved under its own power again.
Peter Jonas noticed
While I had been concentrating on VARIDAMP wiring, Peter Jonas had been paying attention to something else.
He told me Maria’s behavior toward me was changing. He thought she was making an increasingly obvious effort to attract my attention. I had noticed that we looked at one another and that I liked her, but when I was working I was not normally flirting. Work was work.
Peter kept egging me on.
I did very little about it.
Eventually he solved that problem too. Without much ceremony, he told Maria about taking a test ride with me in the Corvette.
She liked the idea.
After work we left the plant together. We drove only a few miles: left out of Knauer, eventually right, then steeply uphill to a road that effectively ended for cars and continued as some sort of walking or hiking path.
That first ride happened only after the Corvette had been repaired.
During the installation I was staying at the Hotel Rößle, associated with a Metzgerei. Maria knew the owners and did not want to create local gossip, so she stayed away from the hotel. On later service visits I deliberately stayed somewhere else.
Maria and I continued seeing one another when I returned to Dettingen for follow-up work.
Commissioning and handover
The complete installation took about eight weeks. I personally spent roughly five or six weeks on site.
At the end we commissioned the press in the usual way, including GATF test sheets, and I am sure we also ran a first production job. I remember it as packaging material; exactly what product it was for is gone now.
The important part is not gone.
The Varimat was commissioned, tested, accepted, and formally handed over to Knauer.
That concluded my first stay in Dettingen.
It did not conclude my involvement with that press.
Epilogue: the rats
On my second or third return to Knauer, parts of the Fuji / VariControl console stopped controlling the press correctly. Signals were not reaching some of the unit motors, and several functions appeared to have failed.
The symptoms pointed to the interface between console and press, so I checked the plugs and cables underneath the console.
That was where I found the rat droppings.
Then I found the cables.
The rats had gone wild in the covered cable troughs and gnawed through interface conductors. The trough system ran continuously around the press and along the walls under diamond plate, giving the animals an excellent private transportation network.
The repair was conductor by conductor: soldering, heat-shrink tubing, restoring damaged lines, then sealing access points and dealing with the rats themselves.
One press. One Corvette. One romance. And eventually rodents eating the control wiring.
Knauer produced packaging.
For me, it produced stories.
A dead Corvette. A new Planeta. And the wrong parking spot.