Month: December 2020

Shizuoka-ST-N-Manual

Got a new machine for the shop. This one is from 1984 and it’s in superb shape mechanically. Electrically it is has (had) one known issue: the X axis servo drive/velocity board would trip and cause a 401 alarm on the control intermittently (resolved this by removing a capacitor from the rotary phase converter to lower the voltage on the third leg, it was over 300 volts). It has a Fanuc 6MB control. I’m going to post some resources for this machine here just in case another person is ever looking, I had a tough time even finding a photo of this machine online.

It is remarkable to me just how large the computer is that runs this control is, particularly with how limited the user interface is. This one still has a punched paper tape reader, but came with a BTR (behind the tape reader) unit that allows serial communication with a PC. Here is a photo of that:

The previous owner told me this came from a place in Australia, it’s a “Gateway V4 BTR” from Inspiration Systems. Information on this is also scarce online. It looks like this is the site for the company that produced it: http://www.softcncware.com/, but unfortunately they’re no longer in business. The wayback machine has some snapshots of the site which may have useful information on it. I am not going to mess with it until I need to, so far I have been able to load a program into memory from a PC with a USB serial adapter using DNC4U, but have not had success punching out the parameters, and haven’t tried drip-feeding a program yet.

I have the original manual for the machine from Shizuoka, a parts manual, as well as some very old “Data Sheet” pages that look like they’re from Fanuc and contain some special parameters for this machine – I have scanned them but the ink has faded to the point where it’s almost invisible, I’ll post those if I can recover something readable.