Editorial policy

Who writes this, and who is accountable

All editorial content is written by Mike M., owner, iron mako media. There is no anonymous contributor pool and no outsourced byline: one person is responsible for every figure on the site, and the byline on each page names them.

Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media, the independent publisher of Garage & Workbench. Every pick here is chosen against published criteria — load ratings, coverage, wattage and running cost, warranty terms — not vendor copy. Where a pick rests on specifications and owner reports rather than our own bench time, the page says so.

We do not publish content supplied or approved by a manufacturer, and no page is reviewed by a brand before it publishes.

The scope-honesty rule

This is the rule that governs how this site writes, so it is published rather than kept internal.

Every ranked page states what the pick rests on. A visible "How we picked" block sits near the top of every roundup and comparison, and it says in plain terms that the ranking is built from published specifications, warranty terms and owner-report patterns — and that we have not bolted these products to a wall, loaded them to failure, run them through a winter or measured anything ourselves.

We do this because most of this category does not. The sites ranking for these searches describe testing that leaves no trace — no measurements, no photographs, no repeatable method — and a reader cannot tell that apart from real work. Saying what our scope is, every time, is the only honest way to be useful.

• Where a page draws on genuine hands-on knowledge, it says so explicitly. Everywhere else it does not imply it.
• We never reproduce another publisher's test results as though they were ours.
• We publish no star ratings and no review counts, because we hold no review data of our own, and no rating markup of any kind is emitted in this site's structured data.
• Any score beside a pick is editorial — our weighting against the stated criteria — and is labeled as such.

Our methodology sets out the criteria for each of the seven categories.

No fabrication, at all

A hard rule, and the reason several things you might expect to see here are absent:

What our dates mean

A last updated date on this site means somebody changed something on that page on that date. That is worth saying out loud, because restamping unchanged pages with the current month is standard practice in this category and it makes the date meaningless.

• Published is when the page first went live.
• Updated is the date of the most recent real edit — a changed pick, a corrected figure, a new product, a rewritten section.
• Prices changing does not update the date, because prices are not part of the page's content. They render live on every request.
• A page nobody has edited keeps its original date, however old that looks.

Corrections

Specification errors on this site have real consequences — a wrong load rating on an overhead rack is a rack above a car. We treat corrections as the highest-priority work on the site.

1. Report it to contact@garageandworkbench.com, naming the page and the figure. A link to the manufacturer's published spec helps and is not required.
2. We verify it against the manufacturer's own documentation or listing, not against another publisher.
3. We fix it promptly. Factual errors in specifications are corrected as soon as they are confirmed.
4. We date-stamp it on the page, so the correction is visible rather than silently absorbed.
5. We check sibling pages, because a figure wrong in one place is usually wrong in several.

Commission, and what it does not buy

This site earns Amazon affiliate commission. It does not influence a pick, a rank or a score, and the things it specifically does not buy are worth listing:

• Not a rank. Several picks here are the cheapest item in their category, which pays the least.
• Not placement. No manufacturer has ever paid to appear on this site, and the answer would be no.
• Not a pre-publication review. No brand sees a page before it goes live.
• Not softer criticism. The cons list on a recommended product is the same cons list it would get if we earned nothing.

The full affiliate disclosure is here, and it is also surfaced above the first affiliate link on every page that carries one.

Sources

Every number on this site traces to a primary source — the manufacturer's spec sheet, its product listing, its warranty terms, or a published standard. Pages carry a Sources section naming what each citation was used for, so a claim is checkable rather than merely attributed.

We do not cite competitors' unverified testing claims as evidence. Outbound citations are evidence links with descriptive anchors; they open in a new tab.

How often pages are reviewed

Questions about any of this: contact@garageandworkbench.com.