(Sorry, I don’t have a working camera at hand. If what this is this isn’t ‘obvious’ to someone, I’ll get a friend to help me with a photo.)
I’ve been sorting through boxes left from my mother’s estate and found … something. From dated papers in the box, it’s likely it was packed away around 1986 if that gives a clue.
There’s a turned wood handle just about three inches tall. It’s attached to a wooden disk about 1/2" thick, 2 1/4" in diameter. The ‘bottom’, that is, the face of the disk opposite the handle, is gently rounded. Convex, as in, when you set it down on the face, it rocks gently like a Weeble. Just looking at it sitting there, it looks rather like those seals that used to be pressed into melted wax to ‘sign’ them.
All the wood is painted in what looks like black enamel. While the handle is smooth and shiny and undamaged, the bottom surface is roughened, especially in the center, as if it has been repeatedly but gently pounded against something.
Mostly surrounding the lip of the disk is a springy metal (steel?) band just about 1/2" wide, with about a 3/4" gap. It’s clearly intended to be incomplete rather than a broken remnant: the ends of the gap are neatly rounded, and the last bit of each end is gently bent up slightly to form a lip.
Looking at it, my overwhelming impression is that something is supposed to be stretched over the rounded face and held in place by the band. And then the gadget is used to pound/press/thump/? against something else.
But what? And why?
The only object I can think of that works somewhat similarly are sanding blocks, but the metal band fits too tightly to hold sandpaper, and the inside surface of the band doesn’t show any of the scratches which I think sandpaper would have to leave on it. Plus all sanding blocks I’ve seen have flat working surfaces, and a two inch circle doesn’t seems desirable for sanding large surfaces or fitting into the corners of small ones.
I thought of the fad for gravestone rubbings – but those are done with big wax crayons. Potentially carbon paper could be held onto it to leave a mark, but surely you’d have to be replacing it after just a few seconds of rubbing so that seems unlikely.
And that exhausts my ideas.
So I turn to the collected wisdom and immense collection of arcane knowledge that is the Straight Dope community: What this mysterious object?
