CNC Brand Profiles

Chevalier: The Grinder Company That Never Stopped Being One

Most builders start somewhere and then become something else. The founder makes gear cutters and forty years later the company is known for machining centers, and the original product is a line item nobody in the room remembers. Chevalier is the rare case where the starting product is still the headline product forty-eight years on, and understanding that is most of what you need to know before you buy one used.

Chevalier at a Glance

The Grinder Came First

Falcon Machine Tools was established in 1978 as a manufacturer of precision surface grinders. Not a general machine tool company that happened to make grinders. A grinder company.

That distinction matters more in grinding than it does in most categories. A surface grinder is a deceptively simple machine, a table that reciprocates under a wheel, and the entire value of it lives in things you cannot see from across the room: how flat the ways are, how the table motion behaves at the reversal, how much the spindle runs out, how much heat the machine puts into the work, and whether any of that is still true after ten thousand hours. A builder gets good at those things by making the same machine for decades and fixing the same complaints over and over.

Chevalier had a twenty-seven year head start on that learning curve before the company built anything else of consequence, and by the time the lathes and machining centers arrived, the grinder was already the thing the name meant.

Grade A in 1981, ISO 9002 in 1992

Two dates in the company record are worth more than they look, because they are not about Chevalier at all. They are about Taiwan.

In 1981, three years after founding, Falcon was designated Taiwan's first Grade A grinding machine manufacturer. In 1992 it became the first Taiwanese machine tool builder of any kind to receive ISO 9002 and CNS 12682 certification. ISO 14000 followed in 2000.

Remember what Taiwanese machine tools meant to an American buyer in 1981. The word was cheap, and cheap was the whole proposition. A Taiwanese machine was what you bought when the Japanese machine cost too much and the American machine was on a twelve month lead time. The idea that a Taiwanese builder would chase a formal quality designation before it chased volume was not the obvious play.

That is the thread that runs through the whole company history, and it is why the brand sits where it does today. Taiwan spent forty years moving from cheap to credible, and Chevalier was in front of that move rather than carried along by it.

Certifications are easy to dismiss as paperwork. In this case the dates are the argument. Being first to something in 1981 and first again in 1992 is not paperwork, it is a company deciding a decade ahead of its market what it wanted to be judged on.

Hydrostatic, and the Machine That Proved the Point

In 2004 Chevalier developed the Hydro-H1224, a hydrostatic grinder built for nano-level precision. It is the single best piece of evidence for the argument this article is making.

A hydrostatic way is a bearing where the moving member rides on a pressurized film of oil rather than on metal sliding against metal. Nothing touches, so there is no stick-slip at low feed, no wear over time, and the damping is excellent. It is also expensive, fussy to build, and requires the builder to hold geometry that rolling elements would let you get away with missing. Builders do not attempt hydrostatic ways to fill a hole in a catalog. They attempt them because grinding at that level is what the company is actually about.

The line kept moving in the same direction. The FSG-ADIV series of fully automatic precision surface grinders arrived in 2017, the SMART-B818III took a Taiwan Excellence Award in 2018, and the iMCS monitoring system for around the clock machine watching followed in 2019.

Two Names on the Same Machine

This trips people up constantly, so here it is plainly.

Falcon Machine Tools Co., Ltd. is the company. It is based in Changhua, Taiwan, it took a public listing in 1998, and it is the legal entity that designs and builds the machines.

Chevalier is the brand on the casting. It is what the machine says on the front, what the dealer network sells, and what you will find on the tag when a machine shows up at auction.

They are the same thing. If you are chasing a manual, a parts list or a serial number lookup and you only search one of the two names, you will miss half of what exists. Search both. The same applies to the China operations, where Falcon has run factories and service centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Dongguan and Chongqing since the early 2000s, with a Suzhou plant added in 2013, and a subsidiary named Lin Yu International Industrial established in 2022.

Everything Else Came Later

The rest of the catalog is real, and it is also younger than most buyers assume.

Vertical lathe production began through a partnership with a Japanese manufacturer in 2005, twenty-seven years after the company started. The five axis vertical machining center did not arrive until 2015.

None of that is a knock. A builder with a grinding company's habits brings something specific to a machining center: obsession about way geometry, about spindle runout, about thermal behavior. Those habits transfer. But they are habits applied to a newer product, not a second forty-eight year track record, and a used buyer should price that accordingly. A 2010 Chevalier surface grinder is a machine from a company doing what it had done for thirty-two years. A 2016 five axis is a machine from a company doing something it had done for one.

The Lineup in Shop Language

If you are moving a shop off manual turning, the FCL teach-in machines are the bridge, and the same logic applies that makes a manual engine lathe worth keeping: the shortest path from problem to chip usually wins for a quantity of one.

How the Machines Are Built

Two construction details are worth knowing because they affect what the machine is like to own in year fifteen.

Chevalier builds on Meehanite cast iron with hand-scraped surface preparation. Meehanite is a controlled process for producing iron with consistent, predictable grain structure, and hand scraping is the slow manual method of bringing two surfaces into true bearing contact. Neither is fast and neither is cheap. Both exist for the same reason a lathe bed is iron rather than steel: what a precision machine needs is damping and dimensional stability over decades, not stiffness per pound on day one.

The company also builds its own spindles in house, alongside its own R&D, machining, sheet metal and electronics departments. On a grinder that matters more than it would on almost any other machine, because the spindle is the accuracy. And the controls on most Chevalier machining centers and lathes are Fanuc, which is worth real money on the used market for an unglamorous reason: the people who can run and fix Fanuc are everywhere.

U.S. Presence and Support

Chevalier has had an American branch since 1982, four years after the company was founded, which is early for a Taiwanese builder of that era. Chevalier Machinery Inc. operates from Santa Fe Springs, California, running a showroom, the main parts and warehousing operation, distribution, and training and technical support.

For a used buyer this is the question that decides whether a machine is an asset or a problem, and Chevalier answers it better than most brands in its price class. A forty-four year old parts operation on American soil means spares for older machines are a phone call rather than a container. Check availability for your specific model and year before you commit, because no builder stocks everything forever, but the infrastructure is there.

How Chevalier Compares to Okamoto, Kent and Acer

In surface grinding, the field a buyer actually shops includes Okamoto, Kent, Acer, Supertec and Proth alongside Chevalier. We are not going to rank them on price here, because where any given machine lands depends far more on model, year and condition than on the badge, and the used market prices a tired machine like a tired machine whoever built it.

What separates Chevalier in that set is the depth of the documented record: founded in 1978 as a grinder specialist rather than a general builder, first to Taiwan's Grade A designation in 1981, first Taiwanese machine tool builder to ISO 9002 in 1992, a hydrostatic machine in the catalog since 2004, and an American parts operation running since 1982. Those are dated facts rather than marketing positioning, and they are the kind of thing you can check.

On the machining center and lathe side the comparison is different and less flattering. There, Chevalier is one credible option among many, competing with Doosan, Hyundai Wia, Hurco, Haas and a long list of Taiwanese builders, and it does not have the category history it has in grinding. Buy a Chevalier VMC because the machine and the price are right for the work, not because of the name.

Why a Used Chevalier Holds Value

Four things, in order of how much they matter.

Surface grinders in general depreciate slowly, because a grinder that has been maintained does the same job at thirty years old that it did new. There is no equivalent of a control going obsolete or a spindle technology moving on. The work is flat and it stays flat.

The parts and service operation has been in California since 1982, which means the machine is supportable and buyers know it.

The construction is conservative in the way that ages well. Meehanite iron, hand-scraped surfaces and in-house spindles are not features that show up in a spec comparison, and they are exactly what determines whether a used machine still holds tenths.

And Fanuc controls on most of the CNC equipment keep the machine in the mainstream for programming, service and operator hiring, which is a quiet but real drag on depreciation.

What to Check When Buying a Used Chevalier

On a surface grinder, in this order:

The spindle. Indicate it. On a grinder, spindle condition is not one factor among several, it is most of the machine's remaining value. Listen to it run at speed and feel the housing for heat after it has been going a while.

The ways and the table reversal. Run the table the full length of its travel and watch for hesitation or a change in effort at each end. A machine that has spent its life grinding one small area in the middle of the chuck will tell you there.

The chuck. A magnetic chuck that has been reground repeatedly is thinner than it started, and there is a limit. Ask how many times it has been dressed and measure it if you can.

Grind a test part. This is the one nobody does and the only one that settles the question. Take a cut and check the finish and the flatness. A grinder will hide a lot standing still and nothing at all under a wheel.

On the CNC machines, add the usual: control generation and whether it is still supported, way cover condition, ballscrew backlash, tool changer function through every pocket, and spindle hours if the control tracks them.

Resell CNC Take

Buy the grinders with confidence and buy the rest on the machine's own merits. That is not a criticism of the machining centers, it is just an honest read of where forty-eight years of accumulated competence actually sits. A well kept Chevalier surface grinder is one of the better value buys in the used market, because grinders do not go obsolete, the American parts operation has been running since 1982, and the construction was never the corner anybody cut.

Frequently Asked Questions