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Originally Posted by Dave_Watts
Aircraft compasses in comparison would be a dime a dozen. Dave W.
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Holy Smokes, Dave! I'll pay you DOUBLE-twenty cents a dozen...
One of the Bamberg compasses just sold at auction, last month for over $4,000. (and NO- I Don't have any to sell, so I'm not puffing up the price..)
In my experience the two hardest items to find are the anenometer-type airspeeds and the compasses, especially a compass with all the brackets & fittings. But you are right (of course) that the one on Ebay would be just fine in most replicas-pretty good in fact. And I agree that you might trade it for something special from a Zeppelin collector, even though that particular one has been really beat up. It is well worth the asking price, though. It is a rare item. As a budgetary solution for many replica builders, we used to buy nice marine compasses from Japan, and fabricate a couple of mounting brackets from some 1/8" 6061 aluminum, and paint them flat black. But that supplier, disappeared-even before the days of the Internet. I think that Plath makes a modern marine compass-with the flat glass that is very close to the original WWI German size, that usually runs under $100 on Ebay. They run on Ebay fairly often. I just checked and don't see any today. But it is the larger version of this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=37967&item=7326121 006&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW