...
The only way to avoid this drama is to take the computer in parts and ship them in one or more boxes.
This, or pickup it yourself are, the only two safe ways to buy such a beautiful and rare machine.
The 12 pski shipped to me was done right, in pieces, with the CRT in a box by itself. Now, there were no drives in the lot, and those drives are a big part of the problem.
After seeing that 16B going at $538 ($538!!!!) I was wishing I had not gotten rid of the 6000, 16B's, and 12 that I had, since I could net several grand on the hardware I had at the time. But now I'm a bit glad that I did, because as fragile as these cases are getting I wouldn't want to have a buyer have this happen to them, nor would I want to shoulder the financial loss as the seller.
Heh, I am within a four-hour drive of where that 16B was, in NC, but a 16B just ain't worth $538 plus shipping to me. Been there and rode that pony. The last of the beasts I had was the 12, which I kept as my last LS-DOS machine until I gave it away late 2001, after making the copies of the disks for Tim Mann to image (I kept some copies; one of my DSDD LS-DOS 6.3.1A working system disks (cleaned of actual data) went to pski along with the LS-DOS 6.2 disk and he successfully imaged both of them).
They're fun, and I'm looking forward to getting hard disk booting working for the II/12 series, but I remember them as actual working main computers, not fun retrocomputing-hobby machines.