Looks to me like that rusty piece was a sheet steel stamping. Note the edges with the cutouts for screws.

Any way you slice it, it's pretty cool.

The neat thing about this technology is that most of it eventually trickles down to us in affordable form. For example, ultrasonic thickness testers are down by a factor of 100 from when I first became aware of them. The Chinese copies might not be 0.001" accurate but even so they're pretty useful. Same for infrared thermometers. ETC.

And boys, enough with the name calling!

R.