I don't consider working with hand tools a luxury or romantic. My first timber trestle took my 10.5 hours to cut. I'm sure many of you have seen it, and I'll try to add a photo if I have one loaded. There are eight 1.5"/1.5" joints and four 2"/2" joints for the anchorbeams. 20 peg holes/pegs and four wedge slots/wedges. I used a boring machine for the 1.5" stuff and a T-auger for the 2". We cut one of these benches at work last month and used the SwissPro mortiser, circ saws and power drills. We eliminated the 8 pegs at the anchorbeams and we managed to trim exactly minus 4.5 hours off of the build time. That's right. 15 hours with the fanciest hand held tools money can buy.

Jon Senior, a single mortise is not a good representation of the time it takes to cut mortises. You need to do all your layout at once, then bore everything on a timber, or timbers, then do your cleanup. I did a pictorial of boring and cleaning up a 1.5"x6" mortise 4" deep in white pine. Including taking the shots and setting up the camera, it was under 9 minutes. In a continuous mortising setup, it would be less. I estimated on the last frame of 50/50 white oak/white pine, the chain mortiser might have saved 3-4 hours. Average the labor saving over the life of the chains and maintenance, and I don't see it as getting ahead very far.