My experience is gator blade do work well for mulching and bagging but if your going to side discharge they wont throw grass as evenly or as far out of the deck as my regular high lift blades. Dont get me wrong they still work for side discharge just not as well in my opinion.
Its almost as the back wing of the high lift blade acts like a blower impeller and help blow air along with grass out the side causeing the grass to be blown evenly and farther where the gator blades seems like the grass gets thrown out at the same distance and makes more clumps since it all lands in the same area instead of over a larger area.
Pure physics.
The blades are spinning at the same speed so they throw the grass out at the same speed.
But the Gator clippings are smaller so have far less momentum thus drop earlier than the longer clippings.
If you can not visualise this, consider throwing a 1/2 lb quarts rock and a 1/2 lb of loose sand.
The single rock will go a lot further than the sand.
An experiment I did many times with my students using a mouse trap catapult.
It always amazed me how many times some needed to do it before they would believe the results.
Physics as a stand alone subject was dropped from the sylabus some time ago.
Next to biology the most important thing you can teach people as physics is the description of the real world.
