This may be a bit late, but in the Milwaukee area it's about $125 or so assuming only small repairs like mirror assemblies. I've had my old FE and FE2 done as I still find them useful in low light. If this is the price range that you find, it seems easily worthwhile. You might check out used prices for F's and other manual focus Nikons on KEH.com and you'll get some comparison points.

There are lots of F bodies around for about $125. The F sold for $359.50 with a 50mm F2 lens when it came out in 1959. I checked with an online inflation calculator and it put it at about $2296.00 in 2005 bucks. So get them F's while you can. He who dies with the most cameras wins!

Dwight

My guess is that a $125 body will need $125 worth of repairs. If you go to KEH you'll find that the prices are higher, and also for other nice models like the F3. I've bought Nikon bodies and lenses on eBay - trying to be careful there! - and from KEH and I will not use eBay again except in two circumstances. One is a reputable store using eBay and the other is a rare item that is hard to find otherwise.

Ebay can be a bit iffy for sure. My experience has been almost all good, I have gotten some very nice cameras and lenses and a few real bargains. KEH is also good to deal with, I have bought a bunch of stuff from them. They have F bodies rated EX with an FT meter prism for a bit more than $200. I also like www.ritzcam.com (no relation to "the" Ritz Camera. I find that my favorites are the Non-AI lenses with metal focus rings and the bodies of the same date. I am not that crazy about the Photomic prisms. There is just something about an F with a plain prism. I also like the F2 with plain prism, I cannot document it, but I think there must have been far fewer F2 plain prisms as TTL metering was pretty entrenched by the time of the F2's introduction.

Nippon Kogaku! (Nikon collectors war cry :-)

Dwight