http://images.geraldika.ru/185/g2082_shklov_city.gif

Is this (in the arms of Shklov, Belarus), that looks like a very strange kind of unbalanced scales, really something else?

An uneducated guess?  I’d say a scale with one of those slide counterweights?  You know, like the one you stand on at the doctor’s office?  Where they keep sliding it much further to the right than we all care to see..

Daniel C. Boyer wrote:

Is this (in the arms of Shklov, Belarus), that looks like a very strange kind of unbalanced scales, really something else?

It is a balance, I think "apothecary’s" is the right descriptor.

You move the bar from side to side in the chain-link, the bar would have a scale on it that would show the wait of the mass in the basket.

I have seen at least one hundred of these old scales in Russia. The ball on the end is a sliding counterweight. Below are some examples:

http://www.scales-and-weights.com/scales/html/antique/brasssteelyard.htm

http://www.scales-and-weights.com/scales/html/letterscales/wipwaage.htm

http://www.scales-and-weights.com/scales/html/steelyards/bismawodsmal.htm

Thank you everyone.  This makes a lot more sense now.