Who am I ?
My name is Alfred Westenbroek and I was born in 1964 in a town called Losser, the Netherlands. (By the way: remember that telling someone your year of birth is better than telling him your age for the simple reason that information on your year of birth is never outdated and thus you don't need to update your site every time you celebrate your birthday !) After visiting primary and high school, I went to the Twente University of Technology (Enschede, Netherlands) where I received my masters degree in Chemical Engineering in 1987. After becoming a MSc, I spent two more years at the university, after which I received a post-doc degree in Chemical Engineering. It was in those years at the university that I developed my "automotive" skills, and became interested (classic) cars. This may sound strange, but remember that as a student you always have a shortage of one crucial thing: MONEY ! We all know that having a car means that you need to spend money on garage bills for maintenance and repairs. I found out there was a safe, simple and nice way to keep your car well maintained but save considerably on the costs involved: doing the repairs yourself and buy the required spare parts at your local spare parts dealer instead of the official car dealer. Good savings can also be made by buying second hand parts from the old car dump ! Good car breaker's yards inspect and select the re-usable parts from their dump cars and sell these second hand spare parts at (less than) half the price of a new part, also giving you guarantuee.
Anyway, during my years at the university I spent a lot of my free Saturdays on repairing and modifying my old car. Not in the first place because I liked it, but just as a necessary condition preventing the car from breaking down and let me travel by bike. Just to keep the car running I worked outdoors in the open air because I didn't have any garage or shelter.
Now this was the story how it all started off. And where am I now ? Well, you can see on the photograph that I'm still busy repairing cars and thus keeping my home "fleet" running and my family on the road. No news on that. However, I turned into a family man and now I even have my own personnel: my (at the time the photograph was taken) 2-years old little daughter ! She's also helping me with the restoration of the '74 VW Beetle, and I must say: she already is giving me quite a helping hand. It's amazing to see how fast two year old children pick up skills by imitating their parents. I'm sure very soon she will find out what fun classical cars are !
� Ir. Alfred Westenbroek
