Is my plastic-geared MG996R fake?

Hi, I bought a couple of Tower Pro MG996R servos this time to use them for my project. However, after a few uses the servos died and me and my teammate disassembled them to find the reason. We found that all gears except the topmost one was made of plastic. Aren't they supposed to be metal-geared? Does that mean that some of them are metal? Or are these motors counterfeit? This is very confusing... Thanks for reading, any information would be helpful.

From the TowerPro Website;

We are the original manufacturer of TowerPro MG995 servo.
There are many counterfeit servos of TowerPro from China dealers selling on eBay, Amazon and Alibaba websites.
If the suppliers removed “TowerPro” logo from the photos and the products description, they are selling counterfeits low quality servo.
Please identify the supplier before you purchased the goods. Only our authorized dealers who provide reliable quality servos and after services.

Hi @seungminchoi

This appears to be the website of the original MG996R servo manufacturer.

It says here that the gears are metallic.
"Gear Type: Metal gear".

Check with your seller if the servo is genuine.

RV mineirin

Aint Google a wonderful tool .......................

I searched for the disassembly photos and most of them looked metallic, but there weren't much and I wanted to be sure.

So if it says "metallic", it means that all the gears are metal, right? So this must be fake... thanks.

Not necessarily - only the output gears see high torque and benefit from extra strength. Although its generally the case that all the gears in a train are the same material in my experience. Metal gears are more noisy, that will help tell the difference.
And metal gears aren't a panacea - cheap metal gears are much worse than quality metal gears for instance. All metal gears wear, as do the bushings and bearings, its just that metal gears can be more compact than nylon or delrin for the same power/torque ratings.

I think the question here is not whether it's better metal or polymers.

The question is:

Is the product original or not?

The original has the metal gears as per the manufacturer's datasheet.

RV mineirin

Geniune tower pro servos have "Tower Pro" embossed in the plastic shell. If you buy them from aliexpress they will usually have "original" in the picture. For example https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2007846621.html

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