Editorial policy

Clamp & Crank earns money from affiliate commission. This page sets out how that is kept away from editorial decisions, and what we will not do regardless of what it would pay.

Commission never determines a verdict or a ranking position. Rankings follow the criteria published on our methodology page — engine ratings, watt-hours, duty cycle, capacity range, build and warranty — and those criteria are set before products are chosen, not adjusted afterwards to suit a payout.

In practice this has a specific, checkable consequence: where a cheaper product is the better buy for the reader, it is ranked above a more expensive one, and where a product we could link is genuinely wrong for a use case, we say so on the page rather than qualifying it away.

We also link products and retailers we earn nothing from — manufacturer specification pages appear on almost every article, and those are plain editorial references carrying no commission and no `nofollow`, because they are genuine citations.

• Affiliate links are disclosed and marked. A short disclosure appears above the first affiliate link on every monetized page, and a persistent one sits in the footer of every page. Every affiliate link carries `rel="sponsored nofollow"` and is marked `#ad` at the point of the click.
• Affiliate links do not change the order of picks. The ranking is set by the criteria; the links are attached afterwards.
• No advertiser sees a page before publication, because no advertiser has any relationship with this site beyond a standard affiliate program.
• No sponsored posts. No paid guest posts. No link sales. If you are emailing to offer any of those, the answer is no.

This is a requirement on every product we recommend, not a stylistic preference. Each pick carries an explicit "skip it if" statement — a real negative recommendation naming the buyer for whom that product is the wrong choice.

Two reasons. It is more useful: most readers are trying to work out which of several good products fits their situation, and the disqualifier is the fastest route to that. And it is a structural check on us — a page where every pick sounds perfect is a page where the commercial interest has won.

Every specification is read off the manufacturer's own published page and linked on the article. Regulatory claims are cited to the regulator — the FAA and TSA for lithium-battery travel rules, NHTSA for tire guidance — and date-stamped, because those rules change.

Where a figure is not published, we state that rather than estimating it. We do not cite a competing affiliate site as the source of a specification, and we do not restate figures from memory. The full source hierarchy is on the methodology page.

We correct errors and we date the correction. If you can point at a manufacturer or regulator page that contradicts something here, that is the most useful email we can get — write to contact@clampandcrank.com or use the contact form.

Substantive corrections — a changed specification, a wrong figure, a discontinued product — update the page and its last-updated date. We do not quietly rewrite a page and leave the old date in place.

Every article on this site carries a byline, and it is the same byline: Ryder M., the owner. There is no content team, no rotating roster of contributors and no anonymous copy. One person is accountable for everything published here, and you can reach him directly. More on that on the about page.