2010 Craftsman Lawn Mower - 500HP

by William Earls
(Cincinnati, Ohio)

My current lawn mower is the 2010 500 horsepower Craftsman model. I chose this model because it was basically feature-identical to this year's model, but the price was slashed by 60 dollars. I purchased it from Sears, near my home in Cincinnati Ohio. Shopping for lawnmowers is frustrating because typically it's hard to see why one model trumps another. Horsepower is played up significantly, but in my opinion this shouldn't sway you- if you look at the numbers you'll notice that my lawnmower, which has one cylinder, produces more horsepower than a Lotus Elise. This is obviously ridiculous, and they get away with this because what they're ignoring is torque. Obviously a lawnmower generates far less torque than a sports car, so companies generally don't go into it. That's frustrating because torque represents how well your mower will contend with dirt clods and weed bunches. More on that later.

Since every lawn mower at the store had basically the same engine (a Briggs and Stratton engine generating between 450 and 600 horsepower) and this was the same engine my father's ancient mower had, I felt safe buying my cheap clearance model. It was easy to get home and assemble, but when I fueled it up and started it, pew. Nothing. Fortunately Sears is a great retailer, they serviced it for free (it was a misaligned governor, and took only 2 days to fix, had I paid it would have been a 60 dollar repair).

Once my mower was repaired it worked flawlessly. I have used it several times now- I have what I would consider a slightly large lawn for a small suburban house, and it goes through about three quarters of a tank each time, meaning it costs me about two and a half dollars to mow my lawn each time. There is little smoke or smell from the mower, and it is light enough to haul up small hills, although officially you shouldn't do that.

There are some snags. Today's lawn mowers are longer and narrower than my dad's 15 years ago, so they're a little harder to turn. Since this is a base model and presumably produces less torque than another larger mower might, it will stall out if you hit an uneven bit of soil, or a big rock, or really deep grass. Go slowly and you can power through the weeds, though. All in all the 2010 Craftsman 500 horsepower basic lawn mower is just fine for everyday home use.

For a larger lawn you might want something stronger, but if my lawn was any bigger I would buy a riding mower so that's a non-issue really. At 140 dollars, the price is also impossible to beat. It will guzzle gas, but not much, and it's no worse for the outdoors than an electric- most American power comes from fossil fuels anyhow, and if you buy a battery-powered mower than it's full of toxic polymetallic cells, so the minute emissions of a gas mower are really no big deal.

Buy this mower and don't waste your money on fancier ones, unless your yard is huge in which case skip push-mowers and get a lawn tractor. Now I'll address the stuff that the store can't officially tell you: Craftsman mowers are pretty user-serviceable.

Sears sells almost all the parts to completely rebuild the engine and then some, and the manuals give a good idea of how to break it down. I could have fixed the governor but I didn't feel I should have to on a new purchase. This mower has no built-in mulching, but it still tears sticks and old newspapers and tin cans and plastic bottles to shreds without difficulty.

Of course this isn't safe, but you can do it if you want to live dangerously, or if you hate picking up your yard. As I stated above, the mower goes up hills wonderfully. You're supposed to run perpendicular to the slope, but the difficulty in turning the mower rears it's head if you try this, plus tilting the mower too far causes gasoline to leak out of the bleed valve on the cap and hit the hot engine. That's probably less safe than pushing it up a hill, in my opinion.