Years ago I had the job of replicating a printing press for the St Marys City restoration in southern MD, very much the same period as Williamsburg. As a reference I had a nicely illustrated book written by a university prof and amateur blacksmith named Clinton Sisson. I found it easier to weld and machine the pieces and then age them than to actually beat them out on an anvil like he did. It wasn't too hard to make convincing fakes, provided one removed all modern tool marks—I had a die grinder, needle scaler and coal-slag blaster which worked fine. As a final check I got access to the Franklin press in the Smithsonian, where I was quite surprised to see the utter crudity of finish—think of file marks looking more like the scars on an excavator bucket. I had expected a patent model or the equivalent.
Anyway, the workers there would frequently have to replace missing parts to put something on display. In years past they had made the closest copies possible, and if no original was available they would make a highly qualified counterfeit. However, somebody found out their copies were being cited by researchers as heretofore unknown and highly revelatory examples of period style evolution, etc., which was embarrassing all around. So "replacement" parts afterward lacked the surface aging (no more dragging around the parking lot in chains) and had to be prominently stamped with an R for replica. Being under no such constraint, I went all-out to counterfeit the thing. I learned about how threads were laid out by wrapping the shaft with twine and following the spiral with a cape chisel. The big brass nut on the press spindle would've been cast in place and then forced off with a giant wrench. It was a 2-3/4 triple start very coarse lead which I did by overdriving the change gears on an old American lathe. Scary. Anyway, the profile of the thread in one of the OP's pics looks—to me at least—that it could have been made even earlier than 1600. Sure would like to know what that piece of equipment was for.
