This is much better than the abbreviated version! I'm getting a much better look at the amazing tools and fixtures. This is just something I never dreamed of, and I've been doing mechanical work by hand most of my life. I'm definitely not on this level. I wish I could visit a place like this, even for a day.
The drill isn't the part that is really clever, but it is very effective. I am impressed by the frame the drill is held in, and the indexing mechanism.
There is the abacus anywhere in the world. but this is soroban, a Japanese abacus. On the Japanese style, one column is expressed by five balls. And on the Chinese style abacus, one column is expressed by seven balls.
An abacus! The beads represent numbers, and you can use it when you're doing arithmetic. It doesn't DO the calculation, it's like reusable scratch paper. It just keeps you from forgetting what you're doing. It has a lot of columns so you can put (say) two numbers and multiply them together, and have room for the answer. The lower beads show ONE, the upper beads show FIVE, so each column can go from zero to nine. And of course there are those dots here and there, so that is a decimal point, so now a column can be from ZERO to NINETY, or .09, or whatever you need. This used to be a nice addition to a slide-rule which could do all kinds of things but not add and subtract, so the two worked together. I've seen little kid versions in colorful plastic!
