Recently picked this up off the 'bay - I guess the VHR stands for "Very Huge Rangefinder".
Topcon Horseman VHR by
Antony Shepherd, on Flickr
My first run out with it turned into an epic fail, as seven out of eight shots came up as totally black rectangles and the one image i did produce was out of focus. Ooops! Some of the black rectangles were because I'd tried to use the groundglass but was foiled by not having enough shade and wearing the wrong glasses - when I put the film back on and removed the darkslide I'd forgotten to close the shutter up again. The others were, I think, because I'd left the darkslide out and light had leaked in?
As for the focus fail, maybe I'd not got the lens all the way out to the infinity stop.
Edit: Actually, I just did some checking and found that at the infinity stop the image on the groundglass looked out of focus, so I jiggled the lens back a little bit until I found a spot where the image looked OK, marked that on the rail and then moved the infinity stop to that point, a few mm back from where it had been. There's an old mark where the stops had been, so could be they'd been moved before - if anyone knows of a more foolproof and accurate method of positioning the stops than using trial and error let me know!