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 were bought by an Indonesia company.
Aciera F-Series precision milling machines were eventually to be built in several versions: the original, of unknown date, may have been the F11 - though the first confirmed by sales literature was the tiny, super-accurate F12 of 1943. This was followed, in the late 1940s, by the very similar, long-lived and very popular F1- with both designed for undertaking high-precision clock, watch and instrument work. Larger versions were the more general-purpose though still high-precision F2 (of which far fewer were produced), the F3, F4 and F5. In addition, by the early 1970s, a limited number of production variants were also being manufactured - designated F1N, F1h, F1NC, F3EC and F5NC - together with a variety of "factory specials" built to order for watch, clock and experimental-engineering firms.
Aciera F2  Aciera F3   Aciera F4   Aciera F5   Aciera F11   Aciera F12