Well, here's the rest of the story and how this novice thinks it works... plus a few pics.
From another poster's story, I made sure when I picked up my KKII tiller at TSC that it was well skidded with all parts attached. The only problem I had today when setting it up was that one of the parts was from another tiller /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif It took an hour of fooling around and "if at first you don't succeed..." before I finally called TSC and was told that my PTO shaft must be off of a larger tiller and this happens all the time. After the exchange (seems quite a few on the lot had the wrong shaft wired to the crate) the slip clutch was able to clear the framework and attach to the gear box.
I then fooled around with the skid shoes to get them at their highest point, I think. I loosened the one side and moved the bracket a *whole* two holes higher. Hmmm. I moved on to the other side and could only raise the same adjustment one hole higher, so I ended up raising a different bolt to a higher hole. There certainly seems to be a lot of adjustment when looking at the skids, but in reality too many of the bolts hit the tiller/framework or the skid hits the bottom of the tiller and I'm not really sure if I can set them to dig deeper or not.
They rode on top of the ground well and didn't really leave marks. The only way I think I could get the tiller to dig deeper, is to lengthen the toplink so the tiller rocks back a little on the angled part of the shoe.
Anyway, on to the field! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
One pass travelling at 1.2 mph got me 4-5" deep. Travelling over the same pass got me only about another inch and I slowed it down to 1 mph. I measured this by poking a small stick in until it met resistence over several areas.
I've a good 5-6" of freshly tilled earth and since corn is planted 3" deep I figured this was enough.
The ground was slightly gravelly and enough moisture in it to get it to stick a little if you squeezed a handful. It smelled good and looked good /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif
My neighbor said it looked good enough for planting, after he came over to check things out, like we tend to do with one another when one of us is messing around outside. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
I followed Bird's suggestion of skipping rows and it worked out pretty well. After the fist row was tilled I got the tiller in place to make another pass with a little less inbetween, and used a point on the loader arm lined up with the edge of my first pass to keep me tracking straight.
I think it was too early to till for real, so I will probably go over the same area again in a few weeks and put down the fertilizer for my garden. In the meantime I will use the tiller to level off other areas where they used to have corn and you can feel it when travelling against the old rows.
I'm happy with the money spent on KK. Like anything you get what you pay for and it works well for my needs.
