Cheers gregsta
The decks from reputable Technics resellers are probably decent enough, but I also know there's a shit load of bad condition ones with bent tonearms, loose gimbals, loose tonearms, dodgy cables etc even if they look fairly unblemished, plus all the 'projects' that look like they've been found in a skip.
Mine by comparison are very well looked after, with top condition lids and only superficial marks, even the one i'm still waiting for someone to collect after I damaged it's tonearm.
I highly recommend the str8.150's, but definitely not the mk2 version - which i've only heard bad things about after they completely changed the design to one of a budget deck. I use it for my scratch deck and it's imo and countless turntablists, a better deck than the technics, but i'm looking at a Technics deck for my studio sampling deck, so it needs to look nice and work properly.
Str8.150's have phono, line and spdif outs, so in some ways are better for my needs, but they don't have that classic Technics look