Thanks for the response. The dealer quoted well over $300 just for the piston and can. Not sure if other parts would also be required. At that price plus labor if having them do the repair I am almost at the cost of a new saw. Just wanted to know if anyone else has used the parts I see on eBay. They are considerably cheaper and would make it worthwhile for me to try to repair the saw myself instead of scrapping it. I have in the past purchased parts on eBay for other equipment at a fraction of the dealer cost for oem and found the quality to be equal or even better than oem.
As I previously metioned , it can be a crap shoot if you are not buying from a real shop that has to provide real warranty.
There are hundreds of vendors on ebay some sell good stuff some sell rubbish and some are variable.
If the ebay site sells nothing other than mower / chainsaw & related items then good chance they are reasonable.
If they sell everything from condoms to battle ship anchor chain then good chance they are a clearing house .
All of the certified quality aftermarket suppliers have web sites where you can look up the parts you require.
The last salaried job I had was running a warehouse.
Any vacant pallet spaces were rented through a consolodation company on a monthly basis.
We would get container loads of stuff pack them onto pallets. the owners sent us picking slips and packing slips along with some very fancy looking invoices which we printed out & got included in the packages.
Most of these companies had letterheads showing factories , laboratories & the like which gave the impression that they were a big multinational company where as in reality they were nothing more than a room in some ones garage / basement.
many of these temporary clients were on a cash only basis so nothing got despatched till the money was in our account as we had been stiffed a few times before.
It was quite usual for the same email address to be sending us picking & despatch orders for the same products under a variety of different company names.
Just for the fun of it we occasionally would try a search and of course found none of the company names were registered anywhere in the world ( English using world ).
All of these people had ebay shops, full of stock photos of goods, factories etc pretending to be big secure businesses.
I can create a virtual shop in about an hour that would make the viewer think I was bigger than Walmart, all of which is fake.
So you are faced with taking your chances on the really cheap, buying from a known afermarket supplier for a bit more or going to Stihl.
I work for my money and have problems with gambeling so it is real aftermarket parts from real aftermarket part suppliers that go into my customers machines.
And again you are not giving us any information.
There are thousands of ebay shops, some sell good stuff, some sell trash & some are outright frauds.
Unless you specify which particular ebay vendor you are looking at then your question ranks with "are all USA made cars rubbish?"