If the blade he is selling are OEM blades then the quality will be equal, if he is selling a jobber blade then I would say no. All the jobber blade I seen are lower in price for a reason.
most of the tractor blades Sears offer are one quality style that came with it when new and a premium blade, usualy the premium blade is a few $ more and suppose to last longer, however the abuse the blades take that I see in my neck of the woods make the life of either blade basically the same.
Yuh, that would be useful info- the only way we'd know for sure, but the blade makers probably don't care to give us that info. Although I agree that the OEM probably are better- with other products, sometimes the non OEM are just as good, and the OEMs just want us to think there is a difference so they can make their excessive profits.
I like the comment by Dr. Doctor that because most blades get so abused- that reduces the quality difference.
In my case, my 2.5 acre lawn has lots of rocks in it. It was once part of a cow field and never really cleaned up for a lawn. The bigger rocks, I don't get near- every so often I use my weed whacker to clean them up. The problem is the ones that only stick up an inch or two- most times the mower won't hit them unless it comes at them from a certain angle- then it scrapes them. I should rip those rocks out, but we all know once you start- you find that some are as big as a truck.
When I took my blades off for the first time after 50 hours- I see that there is a butterfly shape cut into the blade which is meant to fit over a similar shape on the drive component of the mower to hold it in place. On the drive bolt component, one of those butterfly shapes looks good, another is worn significantly, and the third is almost gone. I assumed this wear was from hitting rocks. My local repair guy said it was probably from the blades being lose. Actually, that may be the case as the blades came off extremely easy. I thought it would be a struggle and had a breaker bar ready.
On some other small mower and on my large heavy duty brush/weed cutter- the blade's threading is the opposite of most nuts and bolts in order to make sure the blade as tight as possible and of course, they can be tough to get off. On this Sears tractor mower, that's not the case. Then again, I get confused with such simple matters- I have zero mechanical skills- maybe on the tractor mower the cutting edges are opposite from my small mower and brush cutter.
Replacing those worn bolts that drive the blades because of the worn butterfly is going to be very expensive- each bolt costs about $35 direct from Sears and the local repair guy says his labor rate is $30/hr- although the repair guy said he can get the bolts cheaper than Sears' price. At this time I can't afford to do this. So, I'm going to just put the blades back on and tighten the nuts up to the max. 55 pounds torque and hope for the best. Although the butterfly pattern was worn, none of the blades had turned from their original positions- they were all still lined up perfectly- so perhaps they'll hold, especially if I make a point of retightening them frequently with a good torque wrench. Then when I can afford to replace those drive bolts, I'll do so- and maybe do it myself with the help of a friend who seems to be able to fix anything.
Something to remember is most companies don't make a lot of their own parts. I would bet someone makes them for them. I work at a company that designs equipment. We always try to use off the shelf parts it is easier that way. The blades you have might be the generic blades from company "xyz" but are now the oem blade for company "abc".
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