Manufactured by a Swiss precision engineering company who are still trading (Adeka DeColletage de Precision based in Moosstrasse 5 in the town of Pieterlen), this miniature was intended for use in a watch, clock or mechanical instrument factory, the Adka is especially rare, though it does closely resemble similar machines from the better-known Hauser company.
Equipped with all-lever feeds to the table and head movements with the travel limited by screw stops, the intended use was likely to have been a production process involving the mounting of a jig fixture of the flat-topped table with tooling held in the 8 mm collet-equipped horizontal spindle. An interesting detail was the fitting of a weight, attached to the end of an arm on the left-hand face of the main body, that pressed the knee and table assembly down.
Drive would have been from a remote countershaft, possibly by a round belt running over a pair of jockey pulleys to accommodate the for and aft travel of the head. Resembling those fitted from the late 1800s onwards to numbers of "bench precision" lathes, the headstock held plain tapered bearings that could be precisely adjusted for a perfect fit. It's possible that the Adeka would have been offered with a number of accessories including, like the Hauser versions, a long angle plate to mount the head in a vertical position, various rotary tables and also specialised fittings made to order.
Should any reader have more details of Adeka machine tools the writer would be interested to hear from you - as would the owner of the example shown below..