Yeas ago a friend of mine bought out a complete commercial cal lab at a local industrial auction and I helped him haul all of it to his warehouse. Later we found that every single piece of the TE was missing some critical Unobtainium bits inside! It seems that the "Cal Lab" had used all of it for parts and sold off all of their good equipment sometime earlier (if they even owned away!) and reserved all of their crap for the auction and my friend being rather greedy bought all of it at what he thought was a good price!
Personally, I won't buy anything that I can't see work, except for a scrap price. And I wouldn't buy any Cal Equipment that I couldn't see working and that I couldn't check the performance of it ahead of time. Just the added costs of the 20% premium, the sales tax and the shipping costs alone usually makes buying at online auctions prohibitively expensive IMO.