Aciera were 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.Aciera F2  Aciera F3   Aciera F4   Aciera F5   Aciera F11   Aciera F12