I went looking online for kitchen scales today. Lots of digital
things, but nothing I am looking for.

For the past 40 years my mother had (from Germany) this incredibly
useful kitchen scale. It needed no batteries, had no moving
mechanism (just a couple parts you move yourself), simple to
operate, fool-proof, etc.

The whole thing was plastic. It consisted of a measuring cup at
one end of a balance beam, a counterweight at the other end, and a
sliding pivot in the middle, on which the whole scale would balance
on your countertop. The sliding piece had a small bubble-level in
it. Well, not all plastic; the counterweight clearly had some metal
in it and the bubble-level contained liquid.

You set the sliding thing to point at the weight you want (written
on the balance beam) and fill the measuring cup with ingredients
until the bubble-level shows it's balanced. The scale will then be
sitting on your countertop rocking back and forth on the sliding
pivot. In ASCII art (fixed-width font) it looked something like
this:

measuring
\ cup / sliding adjustable
\ / pivot counterweight
\__/ ____ ____
|===============| |=======####
balance beam \/

Of course, being from Germany, the weights on the balance beam were
marked off in grams, and the volume increments on the measuring cup
showed milliliters. That's OK.

Try as I might, I can't find this device ANYWHERE. Not on eBay, not
on my Google searches, noplace. Are these still sold anymore?

-A