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I inherited this whimsical object along with several other woodworking tools.

enter image description here

The item resembles a stepladder, albeit a very small one (about 50cm). A hinge is connecting the two main sides - one being some sort of rack and the other a slightly thinner solid board. The third side is probably a ratchet gear rack, although when the object is oriented the way it is in the photo, the ratchet gear rack is pulled down and away from the pawl, negating the functionality. The item is fully made of wood and not more than 80 years old.

If you cannot see the image, try to view it in my Google Photos:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/RvfapfBEemiYu8kL9

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  • I got nothing, except a complete guess that it's for bending something. Did you try a reverse image search/Google Lens?
    – Graphus
    Commented Mar 14 at 8:37
  • It looks like something I SHOULD recognize, but I'm not coming up with anything
    – bowlturner ♦
    Commented Mar 14 at 12:33
  • @Graphus, that's a Good idea! I tried now, and it shows a mix of mostly wooden sleds, wine racks, armchair rests, and rocking horses, but none of them have the ratchet gear rack.
    – Martin Drozdik
    Commented Mar 14 at 23:45
  • You say "...although when the object is oriented the way it is in the photo, the ratchet gear rack is pulled down and away from the pawl..." Is the orientation where the pawl makes sense such that the "runners" are along the ground and the flat board angled across the top?
    – gnicko
    Commented Mar 18 at 20:23
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    It's possible it's purpose was to hold a washboard. The stains on it support such a use.
    – End Antisemitic Hate
    Commented Apr 2 at 7:06

1 Answer 1

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It is a Quark Press.

This is a conjecture based on an almost identical item listed as such in a museum exposition (Czech only).

Nowadays, most people get their hadrons ready-made from the store, but our ancestors had no such luxury. Each proton and each neutron had to be painstakingly assembled from quarks. The process starts with quark-gluon plasma containing an exact, well-known mixture of quark flavors. This plasma had to be pressed together using the pictured device. The quarks had to be pressed with sufficient force to create a so-called strong interaction between them. Hence, this chore was left to the strongest of farm hands. The production of more delicate hadrons, such as the Omega meson (an important source of Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet), required the operator to rotate the quark while it was pressed, imparting a precise 'spin' to each resulting hadron. This was delicate work, often left to skilled professionals, such as the "Mesoniers" traveling guild.

The previous paragraph is obviously a joke. The device was used to produce the dairy product called quark.

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  • I was so ready to flag this for deletion! Then I got to the last paragraph. Well played.
    – FreeMan
    Commented May 16 at 14:34
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    So, should I move this to physics.Stackexchange for additional answers? :)
    – Ashlar ♦
    Commented May 16 at 14:58
  • FWIW: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product)
    – gnicko
    Commented Jun 6 at 0:40

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