Paul,
Thanks. Appreciate the thought. Perhaps when my car is finished I will attend a shootout with John and meet some of the people I have met on this site.
I don't like to share my winning strategy on Ebay ( I have lost 2 or 3 out of 600 auctions) but here it is.
I always open 3 or 4 bid windows with increments in price towards my max clicking the place bid icon taking the page to the confirm bid window. I then confirm each as I go. This way it only takes 2 seconds to make a higher bid as you click on that window and hit confirm.
So if the balancer is at $150 and I am willing to spend $300, I will open windows with bids of $175, $225, $275 and then $305 bucks. I watch the bids and start at about 12 seconds of time left adjusting where I start by where the price is.
If I really want the item to my max, I don't wait to see if I am high bid but just click from one to the other confirming the bids progressively higher to my max. This keeps the competiton screwed because while they are trying to outbid my $175 bid, I have already bid $225 and so on.
Like I said, works damn near every time. Occasionally you come across someone that just bids max and gets there before you do but it is very rare.