D11R Ripper cylinder failure

I have searched for this and not found anything, feel free to point me in the right direction. I have seen several failures of the years of ripper lift cylinders, either piston pull off or rod eye broken. I have never operated one of these machines, are there any operators that can advise what may cause this failure. I have looked at videos of machine in operation and cannot understand with the geometry of the ripper how this can be done. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Just a guess but not lifting ripper high enough when reversing and the tooth catches in the ground or rocks?

That was my first thought but the geometry is off. Lift cylinders are lower units in this picture, tilts are on top. If you backed into something I would think tilt cylinders would take damage, if you hooked something going forward the entire frame would come off before lift cylinder was damaged.

I imagine that if you are backing up and the ass end drops off a bank or a large rock, your impact could potentially be mostly vertical leaving the tilt cylinders unharmed but potentially buckling the lift cylinders?? I have never witnessed/seen a video of this, just throwing a thought out there.

i read the original post wrong- i thought it was the tilt cyl.

In my experience ripper cylinder damage is typically caused by rocks getting jammed in the works. More common to see bent rods rather than eyes torn off though.

Rocks is a high probability, of course operators tend to not admit they have damaged machines. Seems to always be product failure is root cause . Anyone that has operated a ripper and can advise on any do's and dont's they have learned over the years?

Seems like the geometry favors damaging the lift cylinder when ripping without stopping to lift the ripper. The ripper wants to keep diving so the lift cylinder has to overcome the diving load and the implement weight. Stopping or even reversing to disengage the tooth/teeth before lifting seems significantly less load. But I see operators doing the lift without stopping as time saving.

A rock jammed in the linkage would leave marks on the rod or eye.