I purchased a JS40 from Lowes, and gave it a workout last weekend. Being that I mulch 90% of the time, I installed a Snapper Ninja mulching blade after reading that the standard JD blade bagged well but didn't mulch well. The blade tore through my lawn, whereas my Snapper 5hp HiVac would have stalled repeatedly. The swivel-wheel took a bit to get accustomed to, and performed well on the flats. When I tackled the hill, locking the left wheel aided in keeping the mower straight. Prolonged mowing of a hill can become tiresome as the mower tends to wander on hills with only one wheel locked in the straight position. I switched out to the bagging option, and gave my yard a finish cut. The mower performed well with the Ninja blade and the rear bagging accessory. Good suction of grass clippings and dried mulch from previous cuts. Two items stand out in my mind that are inconveniences - adjusting the wheel height was a PITA, I'm sure with time, the spring steel will permit easier adjustments. And the spring loaded hinged cover over the discharge chute is a PITA when reattaching the bag. I'm sure the cover can be removed to resemble a Snapper. All in all, the JS40 performed to my expectations for a $450 mower. As for Lowes warranty, I've never needed to use them for warranty service, however I did opt for the 4 year extended warranty through John Deere. Time will tell....

You fell victim to 'brand identification' which is an idea you must get over. JD doesn't make any lawn mowers or other small equipment - they have them made by MTD or somebody in China. At this point, Honda is the only manufacturer making the whole mower branded under their name. In the past, Lawn-Boy made the whole mower, the last model being the 10550. JD doesn't make any of it. They just have mowers, trimmers, etc. made to their specs, like everybody else.

I just got a Cub Cadet CC550SP and it is a great mower. My yard looks much better after one cut. The suction on this mower is outstanding when using the bag. It's amazingly quiet and its the easiest thing to start. Starts on first pull EVERY TIME! Did not or would not ever buy from the big box stores. I did some comparison shopping and even though the models had same numbers the mowers had small differences. First being the wheels. Home depots mowers had these narrow hard plastic wheels and the one I got had 2" wide heavy duty wheels. At box store your new mower is sure to have loose bolts on it somewhere. At the store I bought mine, DEWYNNS in San Antonio Texas, they set up my new mower serviced it and step by step showed me all the features. Try finding someone at a box store who could even find where the lawnmowers are. In closing, don't rush out to lowest or home depot to try and save money. I spent the same amount of money at a store that just sells lawn equipment and the service was outstanding. I've bought a couple pieces of lawn equipment there and will only go there in the future.

The issue on all these drives is really about various ratchet mechanisms that allow the transmissions to decouple completely from the drive wheels. It's not that the wheels won't stop being driven when you release the lever or bail or whatever. The problems comes from the extreme gear reduction to go from engine speeds to wheel speed - if the drive is still connected to the wheels (if the ratchets haven't released), then pulling or pushing the mower means having to spin up the whole transmission, resulting in drag. On the Personal Pace models, the mower has to coast forward a foot or two once you let off the drive for the ratchets to release the transmission from the wheels (but again, the actual drive clutch releases immediately). The big difference on the Snapper is that when the drive clutch (a belt tensioner, like on the Personal Pace mowers) is released, the wheels are only connected to about half of the full gear reduction because that clutch is located halfway "downstream" of the reduction format. There are no ratchets at all, but pushing/pulling the mower adds very little drag because only the differential with one reduction and no worm gears is being driven. So there's no need for ratchets, and you have no drag as soon as you release the drive clutch. You'd have to see all this in person on each mower for it to make sense, but it does. As far as I could tell on the fwd Craftsman, the clutch that is inside the teensy transmission is also downstream of a worm gear. So again, maybe they don't need ratchets. I'm not actually sure if they have them or not. But it's the system of engagement/disengagement of the drive clutch itself that seems clumsy, and that's probably by design to prevent lots of engagement cycles. I'm guessing it's just not made to withstand lot of that abuse, and instead is intended to be engaged once for a yard's worth of work before being disengaged.