I grew up running an l3 and held my breath everytime I had to take some weeds. If the weeds were thick you had better be creeping. I know the 9600's have a lot better setup than the l3 did for weeds. Way more power to the cylinder, more cylinder mass, and no feeder-beater to aways dig out. Still, I doubt you would want to go into weeds at full speed. With the Axial Flow you really need the specialty rotor in weeds. With it, you can just keep on truckin'. However, I've never cut so many weeds that the inside of the machine gummed up. If you have that I doubt anything will work real well.