2fastmoto, Ebay seller is a POS.

[Hurco550]

Dang, that sucks. I didn't bother with the cylinder just because after shipping both ways(didn't have free shipping) I would have gotten like $5 back. So not worth the hassle. I ended up pulling the liners and recycled the aluminum.

I was on the selling end of something similar. I sold a NOS cr125m cylinder on ebay, for alot of money, like $350 or so iirc, and I was sure to package it VERY well, yet somehow UPS managed to break a couple fins off of the bottom of the cylinder. The seller messaged me asking for a reasonable amount due to the damage. I wanna say he wanted $100 refund, but he keeps the cylinder. (reasonable as it went from a pristine OEM piece to a broken one)

Long story short, after dealing with UPS for over a month, I finally got $100 from them that I was able to refund the guy. I'm glad he was able to hold off while I sorted it out and not a major jerk about it. After dealing with that fiasco, I almost understand why the seller of your xs cylinder was trying to wash his hands of the mess (even though that wasn't the right thing to do)

The shipping companies make you buy insurance to cover your item in the case that they don't do their job, then still fight you when they don't do their job, making you have to use the insurance... its maddening.

 

[Rat_ranger]

Yeah, I just have the person I dealt with on my do not buy from list. Fins are unfortunately easy to damage. And shipping companies like to throw things around. I just bought another cylinder off ebay, and it showed up faster and undamaged. This guy will go on my good list if I need more parts.

 

[Maritime]

Ha! Don't get me started. I work for Canada's largest coast to coast LTL carrier and we break shit. it's like 3% of what we deliver but man it's still a lot. Standard coverage is $2 a lb and if you don't read the fine print you will get screwed. What's worse, when our folks see something is actually for "us" as final customer, they almost break it on purpose!

 

[pidjones]

When I was working our guys hipped a $15000 ion source to Califotrnia in one of those triangular boxes designed for shipping blue prints. The customer shipped it back, and I got it as a training aid. The once beautiful stainless and copper ~1 meter long piece was now a question mark. I went in to our shipping folks and told them to pack these parts as if the next thing falling 10' into the FedEx shipping container was a crated 300 pound lathe chuck. It improved things for a while.