Other than the ubiquitous Packard shutter, are there any other viable alternatives to shutter a large lens? (No hat jokes, please) There must have been some way to shutter these lenses, and provide some reliable speed choices. Has anyone adapted a 4x5 Speed for this purpose?

How large a lens you talking about, a couple of the manufactures made quite large shutters, the Ilex and Aphax made a hugh #5 shutter as well as #4's as well, and if your handy, it is not that hard to build a gravity feed shutter with the correct slits in it to approxmate accurate shutter speeds.

Dave

The lens opening is 3.5 inches, so Ilex #5 won't do. I'm looking for a large Studio
shutter, but again, it has limited speed
choices.

So, are there any plans available for fabricating a gravity-driven, slit shutter?
Can you make one using an old plate holder
and dark slide?

There was a thread over on apug.org not to long ago about this type of shutter, it may well be worth your time to register over there and then do a search for shutter information, as I remember it it was quite an ingienious design and had a lengthly discussion.

Dave

Studio shutters aren't seen too often apart from lenses, and they are often not in very good repair. They only have two settings, open and "B." I have two of them, and I can open and close it in about 1/5 sec.

Luc and other companies made a shutter that mounted on the front of the lens, held in place with three set screws, usually bulb operated. I have a large one that has three settings--open, B, and I (about 1/15 sec)--and I use it with my big portrait lenses. I had Frank Marshman add a flash sync to it, so I can use it with strobes.

Another option is to adapt a Sinar Copal shutter to your camera. You can find older ones for under $300 typically, and they have a range of speeds as well as flash sync.

Another one on the apug forum is Jim Galli's darkslide shutter. Pretty simple. He uses two dakslides in a V arrangement and by varying the width of the V, he can attain several speeds by flashing the slides in front of the lens. Kind of a similar operation as a drop slit.