Storebro260 Lahte with Sinumerik 6T / FANUC 6T Controller
By Roger Holmquist Mars 24, 2012 

Summary
A Storebro 260 lathe situated at SMP Inc i Valdemarsvik is under cosideration to be refurbished with a LinuxCNC system alas the first priority is to bring the machine up&running.
After 10 hours exploring the system has left the project in the following state:

1) Not running in automated mode.
2) Trouble with the tool change system sometimes affecting the machine part reference point  
3) Limited and not well written manuals in Swedish, might be caused by insufficient translation.
4) A system based on bubble memory tecnology, probably around 8 kbyte in an unknown state regarding reliability.
5) A control system without functioning shiftbutton(!), more on that later...
6) Uncertain positioning of workpiece zero reference point
7) No authorised code examples
8) Some switches and indicators not interacting with the diagnosis parameters, may of course be caused by broken wires/ oxidized connectors.
9) One servo making noise in it's static position, might be caused by faulty/deviated loop parameters?

There is of course a lot of things who is working.
I am able to program the machine without needing the shift button with exception of not being able to make inline comments and accessing a lot of characters who I will soon need...

There is also a technical manual including electrical wiring who I haven't yet looked at.
Anyway, the strange behaviour relating to toolchange isn't explained by those issues.
I have found out that the system sometimes instantly moves  the revolver at the Txx<yy> command at the same distance as yy which is the tool offset in X and Z, that's reasonable but not expected.
Trouble is that the machine part reference point doesn't change as expected.
This can be corrected by another call to G92 with the same parameter values but this isn't what you want.

Below is my short test program, is anything missing/invalid?

First you have to do the Machine reference point seek, this lights up the X and Z refPoint indicators and you now know where the toolholder is positioned.
Then you have to singlestep the following code because it wont run in normal mode for some unknown reason:

O0010
N10 G92 X240. Z277. ;
N20 G00 X0. Z0. ; 
N30 T303; ( Revolver unexpecedly running away to T3 offset )
N40 G00 X0 Z0 ; ( Revolver goes nowhere, well why not, it has already moved... )
N50 T101 ;  ( Just toolchange, no observed move in spite of slightly different offsets...)
...
...

A possible workaround is to correct the position with more G92 because you know the tool offsets but that isn't the most elegant solution I guess and I am unsure about the cosistency of the observed behaviour.
There have to be more tests to verify it or another approach, there might, as I suspect, be some errors involved here.
The existing manual isn't very clear on most subjects so an english version would be welcome.
 
A final note:
Doing Txx<yy> ignoring yy once caused the revolver unexpectedly to constantly revolve!
This has happened once and as we say here in Sweden: 
Happened once haven't happened at all!   ;-)