maybe I should just rotary-mow the whole lawn with the widest mower I can afford, and then make some 24" gang rollers with 24" spacers for the stripes!
Its a good point about the width though, I hadn't really been thinking about that and you are right that 10' would be a lot to manoeuvre. The Municipal Parks etc. over here tend to use a 5 gang Ransomes - never seen a shiny new one, so they must last for ages, but the new one on Ransomes-Jacobsen's site looks like this:
and I had been thinking I could lift Gangs 2 & 4 (assuming they lift independently), but I think the rear wheels are running in their tracks ... and I'm 100% sure I can't afford one of them! but now you've raised the width issue a 3-gang might be just fine, and affordable, such as this Ransomes:
which has the rear wheels in line with the front. 7.4 mph cutting speed (although their blurb states area-per-hour at 11 mph - which I doubt is realistic!). I calculate that a 48" cut at 7.4 miles per hour would reduce my mowing time from 3 hours to 1 hour - perfect!
I used to use an Allen National, 2 acres per hour, 68" cut, looked like a flying-bedstead!
but the rear reel was much wider than the side ones, otherwise that would have been perfect.
But ... the rollers on those reels are a lot less weight than my existing one (specially with me sitting on it!) I wonder if they are heavy enough to make really good stripes?
I had also thought about a Toro, which I think most of the golf courses use, but they are 3-wheelers, so lifting the middle gang would leave the rear wheel running on uncut grass (and running the "wrong way" up the middle stripe)
Here's my front and back lawns (there is more to the side too ...)