Appreciate all the insight and opinions. I'm going to look around for another week or two before pulling the trigger. Just amazing to me that $10,000 will not buy a high quality, 4wd garden tractor (x738, Legacy XL or BX)
YOu are falling into the $$$$ trap rather than evaluating the real cost.
The real cost is how many hours of your hard work is required to buy the mower beause ultimately that is what you are spending.
When we got our first petrol powered push mower it cost 3 months wages and we payed it off over 4 years.
Ten G sounds like a lot of money but in reality is is only 1 to 2 months wages, 3 at the most. Which is what a push mower costed in the 60's
Our perception of vlaue gets distorted because it is hard to evaluate things against something that is real like the hours you have worked.
Money is not real , it is just an intermediate used to convert one thing like Labour to another thing like Lawnmower it gets created out of thin air by banks & governments .
Even worse is we tend make a heiracy in our minds based on the money attached to an item without regard to the quality & durability of the item and we tend to use the lowest price as a guide.
So pushmowers are all worth $ 100, ride ons are $ 2000 , ZTR's are $ 3000 etc etc etc.
There is also a modern tendancy to buy the smallest cheapest items that if everyting is favourable might almost be able to cope with what you need it to do today where we would all be better off by investing in the largest strongest most durable item that can do twice what we actually need it to do TODAY and everything that we could possibly throw at it in the years to come even if that means going into debt for a short while. If what we are buying is a high quality item then it will be a lot cheaper in the long run.
My 69 year old sister is still using the said same lawnmower that our farther bought when we were little children.
Currently I have a Bolens ( Troy Bilt) GTX 18 in the workshop.
It was $ 18,000 ( Aust ) in 1999 and has done 2555 hours so it was not working as hard as designed for.
It is still running the original spindle bearings fifth set of blades, second deck belt and I am currently cleaning out the deck lift bush holes to fit bigger bushes as they are a little oval.
In 1999 you could buy a small 4 cylinder car for $ 15,000, and a lot of peole did just that, however very few of the cars are still running and this mower will do another 20 years standing on its head.
And no it has not been pampered as the owner backs onto bushland which get mowed every few years for fire prevention so they are cutting a lot of small shrubs and running over very rough ground.
