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Lawn tractor purchase

post #1 of 5
5/23/07 at 3:23pm
Thread Starter 
I'm looking into purchasing a lawn tractor. I've been looking at some brands, including John Deere, Craftsman, Cub Cadet.

John Deere seem expensive but I hear will last a while. Craftsman is Sears' housebrand and is OK. Cub Cadet has a nice selection for the price, but being made by MTD, may suffer some quality issues.

Any suggestions? What kind of attachments are useful?

Lawn size 1 acre, all flat terrain, few obstacles other than shrubs and swing set.
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post #2 of 5
5/23/07 at 3:38pm
We have a Sears/Craftsman (their top end model from about 6 years ago) and have been happy with it.

Only attachment we've ever used was the grass bagger, but mostly we don't even use that (we have the mulching blade.)

If you live in a very snowy place, you might look into the snow plow blade, and if you have a big garden, you might look into the trailer attachment.
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post #3 of 5
5/24/07 at 12:39am
If all you need it for is to cut grass, I'm not really going to reccomend a lawn tractor. The decks come out of alignment, the mulcher only works well if your lawn is lovely. They were pretty loud (ours is a Sears from '96), the blades dull quickly, blade tip speed is mediocre, and cutting speed is abysmal. Granted, on an acre, those may be trivial issues, especially if the other features are of use to you. We switched to a 60" Cub Cadet Tank ZTR and the improvement was massive. Time was slashed from four hours to a little over an hour, cut quality was great on even the mediocre grass, manuverability, is of course, an order of magnitude improved, and it makes those nice little stripes in the lawn. Regards, Huntsman
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post #4 of 5
5/24/07 at 2:40am
Don't get a Murray. My dad had one and there were constant problems for 2 years.
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post #5 of 5
5/24/07 at 11:05am
The old Cub Cadets worked very well and lasted a long time. I have one from the days when IH made them. I don't know how the quality is holding under MTD.
The Deere is very well constructed and very easy to get parts for.
I tend to stay away from Sears. They were notorious for having slightly different specs from other manufacturers, even the ones that made the tractors for sears.
This made it so you had to go to Sears for parts.

The lawn aerator is a great drag behind attachment. I also use the snow blade, garden wagon trailer, snow thrower, wheel weights, wheel chains, and a tow behind sprayer. For mostly flat terrain, 14HP should do nicely and 18 HP would be plenty of power
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