Quote Originally Posted by mklotz View Post
The brass piece is reminiscent of a shunt. If it was associated with "battery testing" as the OP suggests, a shunt would be useful to read the battery current using nothing more than a voltmeter.

Check to see if the 'shunt' is mounted to the metal frame in such a way that the battery current could be made to flow through the shunt and possibly emerge from one of the knoblike structures on the top of the frame.
I asked those same questions, but the bar is rather large to be a shunt, would get rather hot I would think...