For the first time in my life, I actually look forward to cutting the
grass. We bought a house on a good-sized lot, about 1/3 of an acre,
which is about twice as large as we had at our previous house
(slightly larger house, much larger property). To mow it with a push
mower would take me 10 hours, not to even mention the physical pain,
and I was dreading cutting the grass every week.

So I looked at prices and did my research, and after using Consumer
Reports (CR), I bought a Craftsman LT1000 lawn tractor (18HP OHV
Intek, 42" deck), which was under $1,000 on sale. It had the second
least amount of repairs (after John Deere) on the CR list, and it was
also third (out of 8 companies) on another CR reliability list.

Wow. I cut all that grass in just over an hour. It honestly took me
longer to look through the manual, watch the video, and familiarize
myself with everything than it did to cut the grass!

18HP and a 42" deck seems like overkill for my property, but when I
think of the time saved, it's well worth it. My older brother has
about 1 acre, and has had a rider for over 10 years, and when I told
him what I bought he said "wow, you didn't mess around, did you?" He
may have thought I bought a little rider with 9HP and a 20" cut.

Another reason it was well worth buying a rider was that after we
moved in, we were having a lawn service cut our lawn every week, at
$38 a week! After 3 weeks of that, we RAN out and bought a rider,
especially after I figured out that we would pay them over $700 for
just this year alone! So we figure the mower will pay for itself next
summer. And, I only used a 1/2 gallon of gas to do the cutting, so it
will cost me about $1.00 a week for gas.

So does anyone else have a similiar model to mine? If so, can you
share your experiences with problems, maintenance, etc.? Maybe
knowing what the upcoming problems may be, I can try to head them off
now.

I read that using a synthetic oil would make the engine run 15 degrees
cooler. I'd like to do anything I can to keep it running well for a
long time.

Thanks!

























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