5 Stihl Tools Users Say You Should Probably Avoid

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If you work in landscaping, construction, or forestry, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the Stihl brand. Founded in 1926, Stihl has made a name for itself as a fairly reliable brand when it comes to chainsaws, grass trimmers, and especially leaf blowers. Early models were made with a dark red color, but starting in the early 1970s, Stihl began to build its tools with a vibrant orange shade instead.

This color scheme stuck around from the 70s to today, but some long-time customers would argue that the brand’s overall tool quality hasn’t lasted nearly as well. A small engine mechanic took to Reddit to ask why so many people still bought Stihl tools today, and this user isn’t the only one to dislike the toolmaker’s modern creations.

Of course, there are exceptions; Stihl tools that hold up well and are worth the extra price compared to cheaper tool brands. However, some Stihl tools are best avoided at all costs. We’ve gathered five Stihl tools that you should steer clear of, even if you see them at a major discount.

When you pay $150 for a backpack sprayer, you’d expect it to be of at least average quality. Unfortunately, the Stihl SG 20 Manual Backpack Sprayer doesn’t live up to the expectations of its price tag, nor the features it advertises.

Like other sprayer tools used for landscaping and gardening, this tool makes it easier for people to spread pesticide and herbicide compounds over large areas without getting tired quickly. It can hold up to 4.75 gallons of liquid in the main tank, and a separate fluid reservoir is meant to help the sprayer maintain a steady working pressure of around 40 psi. The tank is translucent, so it’s easy to know when you need to refill it, and you can swap between a mist or spray setting, though both use the non-adjustable hollow cone nozzle the sprayer comes with.

The features of Stihl’s SG 20 Backpack Sprayer sound great on paper, but many one-star customer reviews have a different story to tell. At AcmeTools, this sprayer has a low, 2.8-star average rating with 145 total reviews. Many customers are annoyed that the sprayer leaks in different spots and doesn’t give enough constant pressure, and hate the flimsy plastic pieces breaking throughout. This particular Stihl sprayer isn’t even sold anymore at Ace Hardware, but while it was, it averaged a 3-star rating with 176 reviews.

Generally speaking, Stihl is a fairly reliable brand to choose when shopping for a grass trimmer. However, you should avoid Stihl’s FSE 60 Electric-Powered Grass Trimmera $210 model that’s only earned a 3.2-star average rating across 225 reviews at AcmeTools. Customers at Ace Hardware rated this grass trimmer similarly, with 236 total reviews amounting to a 3.3-star average score.

It’s advertised as a quiet, lightweight electric trimmer designed with durable housing, a motor that needs minimal maintenance, a built-in cord retainer that prevents it from disconnecting by accident, and a loop handle to help guide it into tight spaces between bushes or shrubs. It also comes with the Stihl TapAction AutoCut C 5-2 cutting head, which is supposedly easy to refill, requiring only a tap to feed double nylon line through.

However, the biggest complaint customers have with this grass trimmer is how unintuitive and difficult it is to restring. Many users have negative feedback on the poor communication about how and how often to restring it, how much string the tool wastes, and how hard it can be to actually restring it. Customers also complained about the tool’s overall design and the motor overheating or even smoking.

For what it offers, Stihl’s SG 31 Handheld Multi Purpose Sprayer is pretty pricey, at $75. It costs half as much as Stihl’s SG 20 Manual Backpack Sprayer, and yet it has about a fourth of the capacity and lacks the convenience of having two hands free to control the sprayer. It can hold about 1.3 gallons of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, or liquid fertilizers, and to use it, you need one hand to hold the pump handle and the other to guide the sprayer wand.

Like the SG 20, the SG 31 has a translucent tank and a non-adjustable hollow cone nozzle, can swap between mist and spray modes, and is relatively lightweight. Unfortunately, customer reviews show the SG 31 also shares many of the SG 20’s faults, like flimsy plastic construction, random leaks, and insufficient pressure while spraying. These downsides, mixed with its small capacity and high price, influenced customers to leave a 1.6-star average rating among 44 reviews at AcmeTools and a 1.7-star average with 48 reviews at Ace Hardware.

This Woodcutter Forestry Axe might seem like a no-brainer Stihl tool at its price of only $49, but multiple unhappy customers warn against it. On paper, this made-in-America tool promises a handle formed with high-quality ash wood and painted with a classic Stihl orange shade for high visibility, along with a well-balanced, 2.2-pound head. Overall, these features make it sound like an ideal pick for most forestry work, including felling, light duty splitting, and limbing.

However, negative reviews across online hardware stores tell a different story. At AcmeTools, 37 combined reviews give this wood-cutting tool a sad 2.5-star average. At Ace Hardware, the tool performed even poorly, managing only a 2.3-star average with a total of 46 customer reviews. Multiple customers experienced the handle splintering or the connection between the axe’s handle and its head loosening or completely breaking after a short time. For many, the axe would become inoperable after just a single use.

This Stihl product isn’t a tool by itself. Instead, it’s an accessory you’d buy for one of Stihl’s grass trimmers: a mowing head. Stihl sells many mowing heads at Acme Tools, some of which have unfavorable reviews, reaching down to a mediocre 2.2-star average rating with over 200 total user reviews.

Among these bad mowing heads, there’s the AutoCut C26-2 EasySpool Light Grass Mowing Head. Like other EasySpool mowing heads, this one promises a seamless reloading process, saying that users need only tap the head on the ground to release the line and that it can be reloaded easily without needing to disassemble the head. In reality, customers report having terrible experiences with releasing and reloading the line, as well as struggling with the auto-feed feature, which forced these users to get the feed out manually every few minutes.

The items on this list were picked using primarily user reviews, which we found on the Acme Tools and Ace Hardware online stores. Many Stihl tools have great user reviews, but for this list we looked for tools that had an average user rating of 3.5 stars or lower (though many of these tools averaged below three stars) and at least 50 user reviews.