blade tip speed of a finishing mower... if the blades are not rotating fast enough, you may be bashing the blades into the grass and ripping the grass vs cutting the grass. and/or the vacum effect of various blades require a certain RPM / blade tip speed to pull grass up "example your tire marks in the grass" to pull the pushed down grass back up into the blades. possibly requiring an extra pass to cut the grass.
with above said, there is to much lawn that needs to be mowed here and i am not wanting golf course grass / lawn, but just wanting to keep things looking half way decent and keep the weeds in check. so tend to run at highest gear possible and highest RPM's i can on the mower. but i keep some lead way, in the throttle. so when i get into thicker / wetter grass, i can move throttle / rpm's up some vs down shifting into a lower gear to get through the given area.
other words find your sweet spot of tractor / equipment at a given ground speed for what the grass is like.
use it and abuse it, only comes with good maintenance of greasing all the zert fittings on the deck to checking all the fluid levels and filters as needed on the tractor.
other issues.....
if you are running finishing mower off of PTO, and hit a stick, and don't have a slip clutch inline with the PTO shaft or a "shear bolt NOT a regular bolt but a SHEAR BOLT" to protect your drive train, and already running engine low in RPM's greater chance of doing some sort of damage. granted belts on a finish mower should slip before damage to tractor, but if you have not hit a good size limb or ran over a brick or something... and/or going through thicker grass / taller grass and have not stopped the blades dead in there tracks, you haven't been mowing.
