Very interesting. I've been meaning to look this up for some time as I post a lot on forums relating to old cars and motorbikes and the hyphenation thing is getting tricky. You might wonder why it would be an issue on something as 'dull' as engineering-based information (see I did one) but after a few examples you'll see my problem:

'I find the old lacquer type paints much easier to use than the currently more easily available 2k urethane products' or 'I find the old lacquer-type paints much easier to use than the currently-more-easily-available 2k-urethane products' ?

My rule of thumb is that I hyphenate any descriptive words which become one adjective to describe the object I'm referring to. This is probably the actual rule but I haven't really checked on it before.

Another conundrum is when simply describing a part: 'the lower wishbone rear mounting point split pin' or 'the lower-wishbone rear mounting-point split-pin' ?