Turret Rotating to fast and missing steps

Please don't post the same issues in different threads as that will just cause confusion for everyone. ie no double posting

So lets try and work through your issues here.

In theory unlinking the stepgen dir signal and using our own should work, but it didn't and the axis wanted to go backwards all
the time despite the flag being set at TRUE (FWD).
As this worked perfectly, I preserved my sanity and just left well alone.
 

I think you are getting yourself confused. This is just a note from the person who wrote the toolchanger component to explain his approach.

x axis moves but goes the wrong direction

In your ini file under [AXIS 0] change:

SCALE = 200.0
to
SCALE = -200.0

z axis doesn't now move but should go back to hard stop

Not sure what you mean with that. Do you mean it doesn't move when you try to home it?

I would advise to get the X and Z working properly before working on the toolchanger.

I see no settings for homing, does your machine not have home/limit  switches?


Just a note to avoid more confusion:

The configuration for the Boxford posted above by Clive S is for Linuxcnc version 2.8 , which is the current recommended version. You seem to be running an older version (2.7). A fair bit has changed with the update from 2.7 to 2.8, so copy/pasting from his config to yours will require more careful consideration than usual or it's likely to cause errors.

Personally I'd look at updating to 2.8 and then work with the config linked by Clive.

I think you should be able to upgrade Linuxcnc 2.7 to 2.8 without changing the operating system.

edit:
It's just that most current iso images out there today require a 64bit machine and yours being older is 32bit

edit2:
for info on how to update Linuxcnc see section 5.1:
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/pdf/LinuxCNC_Getting_Started.pdf

You will need to provide more information on your machine setup:
You are using the parallel port on the pc to communicate with the machine, right?
Are there any axis home/limit switches on the machine?
Do you have a signal from the spindle to measure the spindle speed?