Aciera was founded in Le Locle, Switzerland, in 1903, in an area long associated with the manufacture of high-precision mechanical timepieces. Their first products were exclusively for the local watch and clock-making industries but, with the advent of WW1 (in 1914), production expanded to include machine tools that could be sold into a wider market. By the mid 1970s the Company was at its zenith, with a recently completed factory at Le-Crêt-du-Locle and more than 134 production machines in use. Unfortunately, these good times were not to last and, after a disastrous attempt to move too early into NC machines (although the F1NC ran from late in 1970 until 1986) and a buy-out by the German Hermle Machine Tool Group, bankruptcy followed in 1992 - with the assets bought by an Indonesia company. An attempt at production overseas appears to have been made, but the surviving photographs show a machine of indifferent quality with many of the cast parts replaced with bolted together, plate fabrications.
Aciera F Series precision milling machines were eventually to be built in several versions: the first, in the 1930s was the F11 followed, in 1943, by the quite different and super-precision F12; after this, in the late 1940s, came the long-lived and very popular F1 and (rare) F2 - with both designed for clock, watch and instrument work. Larger machines were the more general-purpose F3, F4 and F5 models. In addition, by the early 1970s, a limited number of production variants were also being manufactured designated F1N, F1h, F1NC, F3EC and F5NC

The superb Aciera F1 Universal Precision Milling Machine - with the plain table mounted.
The F1 was the smallest of the Aciera Universal Milling Machine range. All the table and head movements could be by screw or lever feed and the machine, together with its wide range of accessories, was designed to enable the small workshop to cope with as wide a variety of super-precision work as possible. Models made to some point in the 1980s used a 3-step flat-belt drive from the motor while later types were fitted with a narrow (5 mm) V-belt and 4-step pulleys. The drive on both types also passed through an integral 2-speed gearbox that gave a very useful range of speeds from 125 to 4000 r.p.m.