I recently bought a beautiful 1929 Heliar lens after years of searching in the hopes that I could swap it with the Schneider mounted on my Gowlandflex. The local store quoted me 500 EUR (650 USD) which sounds like highway robbery to me, even by European standards. They recently charged me well over 200 EUR to fix a PC port I broke on the same camera while tripping over a cable, which was painful enough.
The lens didn't come with a lens board, but was mounted in a probably similarly aged but working Compur shutter. I would have preferred to use my current Copal shutter, and just swap the lens, but apparently its threading is different. So they would have to build a new lens board to mount it. And that plus work ends up costing more than the lens itself.
Now, perhaps a more prudent approach is to get the lens and shutter CLAd, and doing the rest myself. Is finding a lens board suitable for the Heliar and Gowlandflex, mounting and adjusting something that's ill-advised as a DIY project? The focal length remains the same, but I would likely have to adjust focus to ensure it is accurate.
Below how the lens came.
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