Thanks for replies.
Hopefully I'm not just easing the chip on my shoulder (or not too much anyway!); if I'd read a similar post about the seller before buying the tubes I wouldn't have touched them with proverbial bargepole.
I'm sure Neil will do an excellent job and I'll have a nice set of tubes at the end of it, just a bit hacked off that I'm still fannying around trying to sort things out 2 months after saying I wanted to buy the damn things.