Briggs versus Kohler.....

[slammer]

Most air cooled commercial equipment use the Kawasaki or Kohler Command Pro. You will rarely see the Kohler Command or any B&S on commercial equipment anymore. Personally I like the B&S Vanguard and would not be worried about it one bit. My current machine (Kubota GR2000) has the Kohler Command Pro. I have 48 hours on it so far and everything is fine.

One quick point in referance to your "most bang for the buck" question...A 20HP Kohler Command retails in the 2K range. Let's say that AYP (Craftsman, Husqvarna, Poulan) buys 10,000 of them so they get the engines for $1500. If you buy a tractor for 2K and it has $1500 worth of engine and say...$400 worth of HST, How much tractor are you really getting? I would be a little bit leery...

Slam

 

[JTKub]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( ... You will rarely see the Kohler Command or any B&S on commercial equipment anymore. Personally I like the B&S Vanguard and would not be worried about it one bit. My current machine (Kubota GR2000) has the Kohler Command Pro. I have 48 hours on it so far and everything is fine...

Slam )</font>

Slam- I know this has been kicked around the boards before, but there really isn't much of a difference between the kohler command and command pro line. Right from kohlerengines.com:

"Command PRO engines offer all of the features of the KOHLER Command family, plus larger-capacity oil and fuel filters, high-performance spark plugs and a large-capacity dual-element air cleaner for extended maintenance intervals and years of nearly service-free operation."

From they way it looks, basically you can turn a regular command into a pro by just changing filters and sparkplugs. From your photos, the command 20 in my cub 2544 looks identical to your kubota's command pro (nice kubota BTW!).

G/luck
Joel