Aftermarket AV buffers

[BuckthornBonnie]

AM buffers for Stihl— we have had multiple failures with moderate use.

Add those to the ever-increasing “hell no” list regarding aftermarket parts for saws.

1122, 1125, 1128, 1119... just use oem. If you’ve already put some of these in work saws, pull them sooner rather than later (trust me).

 

[MustangMike]

I have not been seeing failures in my AM saws, but they all seem to have more vibrations than OEM saws.

 

[BuckthornBonnie]

They’ll fail, man. Start the process of replacing them when ya can.

 

[MustangMike]

How many hours of use?

 

[BuckthornBonnie]

Hard to say for sure. We run our saws basically year round in a variety of environments. Most of the hours are spent bucking big hardwoods (tree service drops) into firewood. We do a fair amount of felling but nothing like pros or loggers.

The first failure was an 1122 tank limiter that sheared away from the metal part of the piece. I was suspicious of them after that so I went through most of my saws (8 or so) that had AM buffers. I found a failure rate of 60ish percent; some just had the start of a tear, some were already shot.

The 1125 series was the least affected since the design has less stress points compared to 1128/1122 and we don’t run long bars on 036s. However, some were starting to fail.

1128/1122 with the small fw side front buffer were the most common failures.

Trust me, this was surprising to me as well since the AV look fine and fit ok every time. They just don’t last in a work saw and I won’t be using them again.

 

[BuckthornBonnie]

One of several...


Most are splitting right there. The 660 tank to case mount shears right off.