I'm from Blaricum/ Netherlands, retired a couple of years ago from the medical field and lately I bought a nice Fabia Mk1 Estate 1.4 MPI with 210K kilometers. During my life I owned various cars: German, French, Italian, Swedish and 1 British car, a real Cooper MK1 998. Most of the maintenance was usually done by myself.
I like boating and Model Engineering and all other kinds of mechanics. I am glad to find that this forum is for a good part an honest nuts and bolts-forum and not so much a bling bling and "I need bigger wheels with Speed holes" forum.
Here in Holland, where most of the Dutch Skoda's are company leased cars, the forum topics are for a good part limited to cosmetic upgrading, a bit of chip tuning and changing radios. .
So there is not so much dirty hands tinkering around.
During the past weeks I have changed the timing chain and gears, installed a double USB connection in the dash, mounted a trailer hitch and repaired the FRH window mechanism. Here in Holland we have a door lock specialist for VAG cars. He repaired my erratically malfunctioning electronic door lock which is now fine.
I really like this car, esp.its long stroke engine. I am aware of its weaknesses though and as I'm a bit of a relaxed driver, I now fully enjoy it's possibilities. I could do a bit of a write up on some of the things I mentioned. In that case you have to do with my Denglish accent. So in the end: Thanks for the invitation and a Happy New Year to you all!