That's my spouses argument too, glad to hear it's not just him that thinks the one quality motor is the way to go.
We've been limping along with a series of used mowers and he spends more time on repairs some weeks than mowing. But we'll manage until we can pay without debt.
There's a reason those walk behind tractors and such were popular - they can do an awful lot. And it's a lot less annoying to deal with a single high quality motor than a bunch of disposable motors (which is what most consumer equipment comes with - you can't really rebuild them, and they're built as cheaply as possible for the designed lifespan). I've got a bunch of "property motors" that are a pain come spring, but I'm still working out what I need around and what I don't. Or, rather, what works as-is and what needs upgrading - my chipper does not swallow tumbleweed, for instance, though I think I can build a new feed ramp for it that might solve my issues. Maybe.
But the older motors are really designed to be maintained forever by farmers - you can replace pretty much every wear item on them. My Ford 9N has sleeved cylinders and you can rebuild it until you crack the block eventually (which is usually an awful lot of thousands of hours of heavy use - and by no means a guarantee, that just usually is what ends the rebuild cycle). The old walk behind tractors are the same. They're built to
work.
One chunk of advice: If you have a lot of less frequently used motors, always keeping a "storable fuel" in them saves a lot of sanity. I run ethanol free premium with Stabil and Seafoam in all my property motors, and rarely fight with bad gas issues anymore. Ethanol is awful for small motors - it pulls water out of the air (since none of them have a sealed fuel system) and generally makes your life a pain.
still dont understand why we're not discussing a robomower here ... they make many that cost much less than 4k and would likely do the job.
You answer your own question, and don't realize it. Have you used one? Do you know it will work on the property in question? There's usually a huge disconnect between what the marketing papers say it can do and what one can actually do. Dropping $600 on a robot mower that doesn't do the job isn't exactly a good use of money.
Can you use the mower to mow the neighbor's lawns that are paying a service? Make it a business and have a capital expense. Earn $$, expense equipment.
A $4k mower is a residential mower that won't stand up to commercial service for any useful amount of time - it might handle one neighbor, but there's a reason the commercial guys aren't running residential mowers.
What a strange part of the world Ohio must be. Here in Anchorage you only need to mow your lawn about five times a year.
The midwest gets a lot of sun in the summer, and a lot of rain. There's a reason that many of the farms out there aren't irrigated - they simply don't need to be. On the flip side, your lawn grows insanely well. It's a great source of mulch and compost feed, though!
Yeah, I'm the guy who planted corn in his front yard because he couldn't stand to see perfectly good land being wasted on ornamental grass, so I probably don't belong in this conversation. To me the whole point of playing English Lord On His Parkland Estate would be the half dozen gardeners on the payroll, discreetly cutting the grass by hand.
In a lot of areas, that's illegal - which is a problem, I entirely agree.
Our lawn is mostly a low root depth device for extracting liquid out of our septic field and giving me feedstock for the compost bins and mulch. It extends a bit beyond that, but it's not useful area to grow other stuff on, and we do want a lawn area for kids to play on (or, at least, my wife does, and I don't mind it because I get the good greens out of it).