I know my load.
Pick my cylinder.

A sizing wizard is for the ~80% of buyers who know the application, not the part number: you know a boom has to lift so many pounds over so many inches, and the pump runs at some pressure. That is enough to pick a cylinder. Enter it above and you get real bore and rod combinations, ranked from the leanest build up, each already checked for rod buckling — then one click carries the pick into the full configurator, drawing and all.

What "minimum viable" means

The first recommendation is the smallest bore that makes your load at your pressure, fitted with the smallest rod that still clears our 3.0× buckling margin. That is usually the cheapest, lightest, most compact cylinder that will actually do the job. The fallbacks below it are the next bores up — more force headroom and a beefier rod, for when side loads, shock, or a tight mounting argue for margin. All of them are honest picks; none is padded to sell more steel.

Why buckling drives the rod

Push a long rod hard enough and it bows sideways and collapses — Euler column buckling — long before the steel would ever crush. The longer the stroke and the higher the pressure, the bigger the rod has to be. That is why the wizard can tell you a 4-inch bore makes your force easily but still insists on a larger rod, or bumps you to the next bore entirely: the force was never the problem, the rod was. The same check runs on every build in therod buckling calculator and the configurator.

Related tools

• Prefer to drive the build yourself? Open the full configurator.
• Just need the force? Use the force calculator.