Converting a Boxford 250B

Yes, I meant G43. That's what I used, but not for each tool change. I will go try again.

Thanks for a quick reply ( 2 minutes!! Wow! )
Would such a remap be easy to do, and does it have any disadvantages?

Einar wrote: Would such a remap be easy to do, and does it have any disadvantages?

It isn't super-hard .

Have a look at the lathe-fanucy config under sim/axis in the sample configs.
That performs a toolchange and applies offsets with just a T-command.

So, T07 has the same effect as M6 T6 G43 H6
Possibly more importantly T0707 has the same effect as T7 M6 G43 H7 G43.1 H10007
(ie, it allows you to store wear-offsets in the tool table too)

Thanks again. The tool table looks fine now. Yet another arbor for my Emco toolpost grinders made. Those are my test pieces. I have a lot of them now. I should start making breaker pins for my snow thrower instead. Those are needed in volume as it finds the items I forgot to remove before the snow season.

And I am still confused regarding the tool setup.
Today I put a new tool in pos. 7.
Homed X,Z and tool turret.
Selected M6 T1 G43 (current tool).
Faced a sliver off a bar. Set Z (G54) to 0.
Turned diameter and set diameter same way. (Homing is quite accurate, so practically no change.).
Now the DRO's show where the tool is. Or rather what I expect, as it shows diameter, not tool position. Which is what I want.
So: M6T7G43, it goes to the tool change position and rotate tool 7 in position.
I then jog the tool down to the bar close to the face and slowly up to it, checking with feeler gauges. Stop at 0.08mm distance.
Then select Z and enter tool offset (bottom choice in touch off menu) set to 0.08.
The DRO now shows 28.something. Is it not supposed to jump to 0.08?

Another item is tool orientation:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/lathe/lathe-user.html says nothing about back tool position (as I have).
But the Wiki does:
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BackToolLathe
Which do I follow?
And what face of the tool is frontangle and backangle?
Documentation says"The FRONTANGLE and BACKANGLE are clockwise starting at a line parallel to Z+."
But the illustration in the manual shows them the other way around for tool position 5 where backangle leads frontangle in the clockwise direction.

Yet another strange thing is that the V indication showing the tool in Axis is present for some tools and for others not. Could this be because of my confusion regarding the above? It is in completely out of whack after me trying the different flavors of documentation and my (mis)understanding of it.

And it seems if I want to have the tooltable edit window I have to open it before doing much else or it will not open.

I'm still on 2.6/Ubuntu10.4 as my touchscreen does not work in 2.7/Debian.

Einar wrote: I then jog the tool down to the bar close to the face and slowly up to it, checking with feeler gauges. Stop at 0.08mm distance.
Then select Z and enter tool offset (bottom choice in touch off menu) set to 0.08.
The DRO now shows 28.something. Is it not supposed to jump to 0.08?

Yes, it should. And it always does for me. Even if there is some confusion about what tool is loaded, any time you touch-off the position should show the new number. Unless your display is showing machine position. But if that was the case the T1 touch-off would not have worked either.

And it seems if I want to have the tooltable edit window I have to open it before doing much else or it will not open.
I'm still on 2.6/Ubuntu10.4 as my touchscreen does not work in 2.7/Debian.

That was a bug, and you can upgrade LinuxCNC to 2.7 without changining the OS, which should fix the bug and leave the touchscreen working. You just need to alter the repository name in the synaptic package manager.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/getting-start...ha:updating-linuxcnc

I spent another evening fighting it. I may be onto something.
I have the tool edit window open. When I touch off in Axis I get a message in the tool edit window that it has changed. Of course, so I Reload the table. I got suspicious when it did not seem to change, so I opened the tool table in a text editor. And what happens is that it does not load the tool table, it stores it! It seems I should have used ReRead instead. So load means load the file from the editor?

I think I will refrain from using the tool table editor and just use the text editor and see if that helps.
Although I think the reason I opened the tool table editor in the first place was that I did not get what I expected from just doing it in Axis.
So maybe I did one formal mistake in the beginnning, and after that I was just doing/undoing for two evenings. I now know that is what the manual says, so there I have for reading the buttons and not the fine print. I just hope that was it.

Zzzzz... Next day today, and I'd just tell you yes, it was as I assumed. Don't know what the initial error was, but the bulk of wasted time is caused by what I did in the 2 programs were fighting each other.
.