No I'm afraid I have not tried it again today . The lathe is somewhere else which is more convenient for working on it , but not all that accessible because of time , wife , blah blah blah . It does not matter to me if it is not pretty . If it works that's good enough for me ! I won't be able to try it out again until possibly Tuesday or Wednesday evening . I have only to sort out the spindle problem I have at the mo and then I can get it home and all the rest of the tampering can be done at my leisure because I won't need to get in the back (I have a very small shed), but thats for another day . But first things first .

Had a quick stab at the toolchange macro this evening . I swapped the 'A' axis as you said and that worked fine . I then tried the macro and asked it to go to T0202 from the place I'd homed it . It then cranked around past 2 stations and about two thirds the way to the next and stopped . It did not appear to try and reverse up to a pawl at all . I only tried it the once so you'll have to forgive the limited feedback I'm afraid . I only had a short amount of time .

I may be able to go and play tomorrow and will try and add the screen . First priority is to get my spindle working and then I can crack on with the "Finer" details . I am assuming I go in to the Mach folder and presumably navigate to a "Screens" folder and put it in there ? Will I need to rename as I did with the toolchange macro ? Also , will MachTurn then load straight to that screen each time I start it up ?

Just place it in the Mach3 folder, then in Mach go to view then Load Screens. You will then need to select the file type, for Turn its lset, when you have done that you will see the screenset called 30t000.lset just double click it and after a few seconds it should load.

Now your turret problem, I would say you have the Steps per Unit set wrong, you need to find out how many revs of the stepper it takes to do one rev, also the amount of microstepping your drive has if any, you can then work out how many pulses you have for one rev of the turret and then divide by 360 to get per unit.
Hood

Right , got it ta . The steppers are 1.8°and the drivers can go between 400 and something like 25000 microsteps . Once I get the DRO up and running , the rest will be easier to work out .

Once again , thank you .

Right , had another go tonight and loaded the screen . That works fine thank you . The DRO gives angular coordinates which is fine . I tried the macro again and got the same result . I altered the steps per to 66.6666 and put the speed up to 2000 and it is almost there . just some fine adjustment now .  The only thing at the mo is that it does not quite reverse far enough . If you tell me what to look for in the macro I will sort it out  .

Many thanks once again my friend . It is great to have a forum with so much help . Bloody triffic .

In the macro you will see for each tool a line that has a negative value, for instance tool 1 will have Code("G0A-359") if you change that to Code("G0A-358") then it will move a degree more than previously.

Hood

Got the macro to do as I was hoping but it still didn't work to well and then I realized that it is set up for 6 tools instead of 8 . I changed it and now it is almost perfect . Almost .
T0202 is called , the turret runs through 45° and reverses back to 43° and stalls before it gets there , which is what I want . The problem then arises when you then go on to the next tool . Because it thinks it is starting from 43° and it isn't .Can the DRO be set in the macro , after the toolchange , to tell the DRO what it should be reading ? That way it will avoid any cumalative errors .

Yes, thought that may be the problem and was thinking machine coords would be the way to go but not sure how the rollover works with them so probably best just re-setting the offset like you say. All you will need to do is add a line before the End If for each tool, it will be

SetOemDRO(803,***)


Where the *** is the value you wish to enter.

Hood

Whato Hood .

Right , had a really good mornings go at the machine today . I added the extra code as you suggested and it works a treat under MDI . I also had to change the starting and reversing angles to compensate for backlash etc , but again it works fandabbybloodydosy for me in MDI  . I have not tried using it under program yet because I was busy setting up my spindle also . On the subject of which . If you have a single index pulse that gives accurate spindle speed , why would you need extra slots in a timing disc to give you spindle speed as well . Does the more slots you have make it more accurate ? It does not really matter to me now because I have managed to sort out my problems . I am just curious .

Anyway , I cannot thank you enough for your kind help . You are a gentleman sir .

I believe Timing was added by Art a long time ago to try and sort out problems some people had with threading. It didnt make things more accurate and if I recall actually was fractionally worse but it did help some users that were having issues. Now however the timing has been done away with and can no longer be used for lathe threading, this was due to further updates Art did to the port driver for threading and by all accounts threading is working well for everyone. I use the SmoothStepper so none of that has affected me although I did have perfect threads with the parallel port before I started using the SmoothStepper.
Hood