We have a 3 acre yard on our small farmette...and have a Dixon XTR mower. LOVE IT! For years we had borrowed a relative's "other" riding mower(s), and they're just so slow...putzing along...the plus to that one is that you can add the attachments to it, unlike our Dixon. But...the zero-turn is fun to drive, fast, and no, no iced tea. I mow with my ipod, and even the levers got in the way of the cord for the headphones, I learned to keep the cord under my shirt. I've also used it for moving around bags of mulch or dirt, just throw 'em on top of it (where my feet go) and off we go. We also have a small 2 wheel yard wagon that we can hook up to the back of it, and it's got the power to pull that around. I use my lawn mower to clean my chicken coop, just hauling the wagon around. Another plus, my hubby is very knowledgeable on this stuff, so he can work on it himself. In fact, we bought this Dixon, non working, on Craigslist, and he replaced some parts, tuned it up, and we've been using it for years. I do 99.9% of the lawn mowing (hubby knows better than to take that therapy time away from me!), and I don't ever want to mow with anything else! We do not have a flat back yard, it's very hilly, lots of rock walls, curves, etc...but it handles it well. And we have a LOT of "stuff" to mow around....shrubs, trees, rock walls, sandbox, etc....it gets right up there. Love it. Angie

I'm going to demur on saxman1's recs. Quaker State and Pennzoil are both made from Pennsylvania crude oil (or were in the past, anyway), which is very high in parafins. They have a bad habit of leaving sludgy buildup, which is probably worse in high-temp situations like our air-cooled engines. Back when I still used mineral oils, Valvoline and Castrol were considered the top of the heap (in the US among major brands, at least). OTOH, even though Royal Purple comes from my home town of Houston, I can't endorse it. It's a Group III "synthetic," which really isn't a synthetic at all but rather a very highly refined mineral oil. Castrol started that whole sham, and there was a major lawsuit about it, which Castrol inexplicably won. But the bottom line is that these are still mineral oils that require viscosity enhancers to achieve a multi-weight rating (and those additives are what make multi-weight mineral oils not so good, too). The big shizzle about true Group IV and V synths is that their base molecules can be made to act as a multi-vis without additives (they are "engineered molecules, so to speak), and their high-temp-high-shear (HTHS) ratings tend to reflect that. My _guess_ is that Royal Purple straight 30w doesn't have a lot of nasty friction modifiers, but then I think that just makes it very expensive good mineral oil. At that point, I'd recommend saving the money and just buying Valvoline or Castrol mineral 30HD oil. PS - Even if you get what I consider the worst of the oils, such as Quaker State 5w30, if you use your mower once a week for your personal yard and change your oil annually, your engine will probably never die due to oil problems.

I worked in the auto-body and paint trade since 1953. Learned a lot about the equipment what to use, how big, what CFM. I learned that most any compressor will put out 100 lbs, more or less. I learned that for a job of painting anything with a spray gun requires a continuous level of air pressure, while using the spray gun. The air compressor has to put out enough CFM to keep the air line to the spray gun at the pressure that gun needs to atomize the liquid while spraying That said: Yes-you can buy an inexpensive, say 75-125 dollar compressor that advertises it will put out 125 lbs air pressure, but, if the CFM is low, it'll only be good for airing tires, or blowing dust off something. You'll do a lot of waiting for it to catch up on the air pressure, if you are painting anything large. I haven't read what "The air tool guy" Has to say. I'd be willing to bet that his comments may be like mine. I had to leave the trade after they started using isocyanates in the paints. I'd go into wheezing and coughing fits, to where I'd have to stop in the middle of a paint job, and go outside for fresh air. Ya see, the paint companies didn't tell us at first, of the dangers of the new paints that had the isocyanates in them, and that stuff would go right thru the old mask filters. Independents, like the ones I worked for, didn't want to buy the expensive filters, etc. that was required, and it was five years later that we got info on the iso's , and how bad they were for our lungs! TMHO: Rusty Jones( I got so bad-if I stopped at the local gas station, and the paint shop across the street was spraying, I'd have to get my gas someplace else!

FWIW - AB was at the last show I attended and had a pair of iron concave cutters soaking in half a jar full of water, protected with the XOil. There was some discoloration, but no rust ...... and they said the tool had been in the jar for more than a month. You've seen my work station ..... (Chinese quince ^^^ ) Almost all the black steel tools are Masakuni, and I store and use them in my unheated garage over winter. As you can imagine, the RH gets up around 100% when snow is melting off the cars, so the tools need protection. Both the camellia oil and the XOil need reapplying after each use if the tool is to be fully protected. Sort of like a gun - they should be cleaned and wiped after each use with something to remove salts from our hands, and coated with a light film of a good protectant to thwart rust/corrosion. I'm not as careful during the summer months, unfortunately, so some of the tools w/o cutting edges don't get the same care as the cutting tools and have some small pits as witness to my sloth. Live and learn, over and over ..... better to be wise than learned. Al