[Jools]

After some years spent thrashing the nuts off my ST chasing superbikes round the country it's getting shabby so I'm giving it some TLC. I haven't got round to doing any work on it yet, but I'm collecting all the bits I want.

I've had plans to fit a Monster S4 swingarm for ages, these are ally instead of the standard steel item and are the same part number as an ST4S has as standard, and the same as the DP upgrade kit for 2's and 4's (minus the Ohlins shock of course).

Lo and behold, there's been one on eBay for the last week, and for most of the afternoon, I've been the highest bidder - until the last 20 seconds, when I was outbid. Now, here's the thing, I instantly pumped in two much, much higher bid within the last few seconds but even those higher bids were instantly outbid. I was obviously trying to manually outbid some sniping software and didn't get another chance because - game over...auction ended!

Even more annoying is that I was outbid, not by an ordinary punter, but by a well known on-line spares operation. Obviously a professional eBayer with all the tricks and sniping software up their sleeve. Somehow, I wouldn't mind so much being outbid by another bloke wanting to tart their own bike up, but to know that the same item is almost certainly going back on eBay almost immediately for sale at a profit sticks in my throat. Still, one small victory for the little man is that I was considering buying a couple of hundred quids worth of stuff off the same operation - and now I'll shop elsewhere.

The biggest puzzle I have about sniping software is that it appeared to be blocking my bids. How does that work? My last bid before the auction ended was £126 and it came back instantly as still being outbid (and the auction was still live, otherwise it would've given me the auction ended message instead - like it did the next time I bid). And yet, the final price of the item was £88. Surely my valid bid at £126 should've forced the bid up to at least that level? Why didn't matey end up paying a higher price to outbid me?

Seems I lost out on the item and the seller lost an extra £38, so this stuff works against the interests of both the ordinary buyer and seller.

I know that in the eBay world of buyer beware and sharkey practises this is pretty small beer - even if it is irritating for a few minutes. At least I'm not being scammed to death. However, I've decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em...

Does anybody know a good sniping tool?