I recently bought a house on a mostly wooded 6 acre lot. There are a lot of popular trees here and they drop very large leaves early in the season. I tried bowling them with the mowing deck on my lawn tractor but they would just pile up and get pushed by the deck rather than chopped and blown. I bought the Champion because I was on a budget and wanted something decent for the money. After seeing numerous good reviews on this model I decided to pull the trigger. I have a couple acres of open grass and this made clearing the leaves off very easy. My eventual goal is to add a draw bar on the back and pull it behind my lawn tractor for the open areas of my property and still be able to walk behind it for the more technical spots. My only gripe is the adjustable handle bar is a little flimsy. My recommendation is to decide what the handle bar height needs to be and tighten down the nut and bolt all the way and don't mess with the adjustment levers. I'm 6'3" and my wife is 5'5" and we're the only two people that will be using this; so I had her pick a setting that was comfortable for her and that was still usable for me and I locked it down. I have about 3.5 to 4 hours on it so far and will be doing an oil change after the next use to remove any break in material from the motor. Basic maintenance is the life to any motor and Champion has designed this motor to be easily maintained. There's a oil drain plug with a drain hole through the frame, a serviceable air filter, and the spark plug is accessible without having to disassemble anything. I recommend only using NON-Ethanol fuel and switching the gas off and allowing the motor to run until it shuts off so that the carburetor is relatively empty after each use.