Hybrid stepper motor

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I need to replace the stepper motor on the z-axis. It is a small nema 23 . I want to replace it with some motors with more torque. Is it possible to use a hybrid motor only on the z-axis? I am using a CS-Labs CSM10/IP-M motion controller and Mach3. Thanks[/url]

What voltage are your motors running?
What stepper drivers are you using?
It might be as simple as upgrading to a 48 volt power supply if your drivers can handle it

What exactly are your symptoms you are having that suggest you you that you need a stronger stepper? Are you merely randomly loosing steps? Staling? At what speeds are you experiencing stalls? Are you sure you don't have a mechanical issue causing binding of the Z axis? Are you using suitable step rates and step timings? At what motor RPM is your maximum feed rate?

If your max feed rate is such that your motor must turn much more than about 1500RPM, then you are probably going to have to lower your max feed expectations.

If you are having trouble with stalling when the motor RPM is greater than 500RPM but is fine at low RPM then you might be able to get away with simply increasing your voltage supplied to your drives. (Assuming you can do so without exceeding drive's voltage limits.

If you are merely loosing random steps here and there, (usually resulting in the Z position slowly loosing height, the most likely culprit is poor step pulse timing (too short pulses) and or electrical communication issues between the control and drive (electrical noise).

If you are getting random stalling at any speed, and you are certain there isn't a mechanical issue causing binding, and slowing the acceleration and max velocity doesn't help. Then you are probably going to have to resort to replacing the motor with a more powerful one. This will almost certainly require replacing the stepper drive with a more powerful one as well. If either the existing drive or motor is undersized for the other, replacing the smaller of the two with one more appropriately sized for the other could be enough to increase your performance. But usually you will need to replace both to see any significant improvement, this may also require you to switch to a larger power-supply

If you are replacing drive and motor, switching to a closed loop stepper system would probably be beneficial and would require no change to the existing control system whether that would be Mach3, Linuxcnc, or something else. (It would still use the same step/dir signals your existing system does.) Provided you configure the new drives to use the same micro-step settings as the old one.