Ebay have created this mess, they had the option of limiting membership, to a level that was controllable, but greed prevailed; when I joined in ’03 scams were unheard of, and deliberately fraudulent listings much rarer, with a kind of a community feeling, and generally honest sellers. (and buyers that fully intended to purchase items unlike now)

Ebay removed members identities so you had no idea who you were bidding against, stopped sellers from giving negative feedback, (allowing non payers free reign) have you noticed some buyers have anything up to 50 bid retractions in the six month period; I retracted a bid once in ’04 as I typed the wrong amount in, but these guys are either bidding up an item for someone else, or bidding to find what the reserve is set at, and as for the practice of placing multiple bids to burn out the “opposition” the word scum comes to mind.

But to come back to your point, should medals be sold? if you are trading in medals with a provenance what are you actually buying?

I bought the odd thing from HM, or should I say everything I bought was odd! Graham was a great bloke, not greedy and hard working, when he retired (well into his 70’s) it went down hill fast; turns out his attributes were a necessary part of the business.
I’ll give Steve his due, when the Blackburn B2 resurfaced the chap offered the whole lot (including an oil painting of the A/C) to him, he passed the whole shooting match onto me gratis, (although the actual fuselage was located in Cambridgeshire and needed collecting ASAP)

Apples and oranges (or some other seasonal fruit of choice) Beaufighter, both systems must be distracting by design in order that they work, but neither tackle the root cause of the problem.

“Cannot see the point of cameras looking at it, if they have failed they have failed and no amount of staring at it is going to rectify that”.

It gives you two options, one is to recycle the U/C mechanism holding the lever hard in the gate so that the hydraulics pull everything into line, and two, is that if you know one isn’t locked you would choose a wheels up, rather than end up on one U/C leg, and risk it going over.

Many crashed spitfires ago, I remember talking to Mark at Supermarine, about the problem, we concluded that a couple of small cameras mounted on the spar(s) aimed at the locks would let you know if they were indeed locked.

What happened to it between 1945 and 1950? if they are hard at work “stabilizing it’s delicate structure” and it was unfinished when the snatched it, and kept inside since then, was it out scaring the locals masquerading as a ufo in the interim period?

Personally I have never seen this, especially in mass production, accessibility notwithstanding most aero bolts (indeed all things spitfire) are high tensile making that difficult; Rolls Royce didn’t use torque wrenches on the assembly of Merlins (etc) as everything was pre drilled and then hardened.

“Got up to mischief with the Germans” really?