Thank you for sharing that photo. It is an excellent way to display a machine head.

Glenn or some cabinet maker would be a better judge of this but I *think* that this was a portion of a treadle cabinet top. Hopefully it was a case of something nasty happening to the rest of the top/cabinet and this portion being salvaged and repurposed. Hopefully.

I still think it's a nice looking idea. With the right feet you could even put a hand crank machine in there with a drip pan - sort of like a wooden version of the iron base on the New National I posted last weekend. I suppose it could even be done with wooden feet if you wanted to do it all without a foundry.