hi there, just joined the ford owners club as i have just bought my very 1st car. i would like to know peoples own opinion on the model, any good? let me know

Havn't really heard anything bad about it, i suppose its a really good entry car.

I have joined to talk about the clutch on mk 3 Focus models. My clutch has just failed after just a mere 15 months from new and 10,000 miles on the clock. There are a lot of pages about why they fail that attracted me to join this forum, as a clutch failing after such a short time is quite ridiculous. I am glad I did. I should perhaps mention that I am 79 years old but still quite capable of driving safely and of solving the problems that arise from owning a car.

Although new here I joined the RAC motoring forum nearly 5 years ago to talk with them about another hot Ford topic, failure of the instrument cluster of the Focus Mk 2 which I then owned. I am using the same name here, Middleman, as I used there. I joined then because my instrument cluster had failed and I was trying to fix it myself. I wanted to offer some support for another member who, like me, knew quite a lot about electronics and had fixed one himself and posted full details on that forum. Instead of being thanked for doing so he was being unfairly criticised from all directions by people who clearly knew nothing about electronics. That was where the display name came from because it reminded me of the words to the hit song by Stealers Wheel "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you". The instrument cluster that I mended using his methods worked well for more than 3 years and was still doing so when I traded it in to buy the Mk3 Focus.