Step inside the most ambitious project yet from Britain's wackiest inventor

Nothing’s normal any more. My forgotten tea goes cold as Colin – a pioneer YouTuber with over 13 million subscribers following his bizarre engineering ideas and mad homebrew inventions – talks me through how you get planning permission for a Bond villain lair.

Photography: Tom Barnes

“The council see something on the internet and they ring me up, which I’ve always argued is easier than trying to ring the council for permission – you’ll be on hold for ages. Now they just ring me!”

Having antics spotted online is a big part of the Furze origin story. Namely the time the police called him while he was at his day job, plumbing, and asked for ‘a word’ concerning the moped he’d equipped with a flamethrower and posted a clip of.

“They rang me at work and I said, ‘I’ve got somebody’s water off! I can’t come at the minute.’ The second the phone went down I went bombing home in the van because I thought ‘it’s about the bloody moped’. I was going to rush back here and take the flamethrower off the back of it. But they turned up literally as I did.

“The policeman asked me, ‘Have you got a firearms license?’ ‘No.’ ‘You’re not allowed flamethrowers,’ he said. ‘They’re prohibited weapons – only the army can have ’em.’

“So they took me to the police station, put me through the system and let me go on a caution. Then there’s a three-week wait before the Crown Prosecution Service decide whether to charge you. And the police just said to the CPS, ‘look, we know who this guy is. He does this sort of stuff – don’t worry about it.’ When I went back, they were a little more chilled.” So chilled that when Colin went to collect his confiscated moped from the police impound three weeks later... the offending flamethrower was still attached.

Not all of Colin’s creations are lethal weapons. Over two decades of YouTubing he’s dreamt up magnetic boots for walking on his workshop’s ceiling, a two stroke-engined lamp, a jet-powered go-kart and scooter, a 360° swing that stood taller than his house, and a stair-mounted travelator designed to offer the world’s most intense treadmill experience without having to sign up to a gym. He’s held world records for the fastest dodgem, fastest mobility scooter, and built a gadget-laden Bond car out of a BMW Z3.

During COVID, he adhered to the government’s two-metre social distancing rules by building a ‘highcycle’ which could be ridden from two metres in the air. So where did this maverick need to build the impossible sprout from?

“Growing up I was hooked on watching anything that had inventions in it – Back To The Future, Goonies, things like that. My eyes were on stalks.” He was also interested in how the local travelling fairground constructed rides, and taking risks on his BMX. That natural interest in fixing stuff originally led to plumbing, but laid the groundwork for Colin to start “mucking about” on YouTube only a year after the site launched.

How’s producing videos for a laugh changed in 20 years? “Production values have all gone up,” he grimaces. “The original YouTube was a lot simpler. I mean, I haven’t changed much. I just try to think of a cool idea. I still don’t use radio mics or anything because I can’t be arsed with checking the batteries – I still shoot and edit everything myself.”

Has he ever invented anything that failed? “There was one: this automatic bacon cooking machine. It had little rollers that got hot. The bacon would go through the rollers and come out cooked... but sometimes the bacon would just stick to the rollers, get all mangled up... then it set itself on fire. Back then I never had any CNC plasma cutters or 3D printers. I think if I have another crack at that, I probably would make a better job of it now.”

Despite his uniform being a short sleeve shirt and tie with no safety equipment whatsoever, Colin’s only suffered one major injury in his inventing career. Naturally, there’s a video. “It’s called Getting Burnt, Popping Blisters And Peeling Off My Own Skin,” he reminisces cheerfully. “It’s age restricted as you can imagine.”

He giggles as he recounts the lucky escape. “So I’d made a jet engine out of a Transit van turbo fuelled from a gas bottle. The combustion chamber was a toilet brush tube and a toilet roll holder, which was like sort of siliconed together and held with a chain. The oil system was me just pouring oil in the top, catching it at the bottom, just recirculating it.”

“I’d gone in for a cup of tea, come back out and forgot I hadn’t tightened the nut up on the gas bottle. So I was sitting here trying to get it started and of course it was leaking gas, then all of a sudden a spark shot out the back and it just went booooooooofff. Literally blew the workshop doors open.” I’ll spare you the more grizzly details, but as he proudly shows off, there’s surprisingly little scarring.

When the underground garage is complete, it’ll feature a rotating car lift for carrying Colin’s DeLorean to ground level, while the tunnel that leads into the house will be extended beneath the garden to connect with the secret bunker lounge beneath his shed. “When we have a heatwave it stays nice and cool down here,” Colin says as we continue the tour. Not for long, after he’s demonstrated his flame-spewing electric guitar.

With all this hidden real estate, I have to ask: Is this uniquely Furze’d property now unsellable? “Everybody wants to know what it’s worth,” he laughs. “People say to me, ‘Oh, it’s worth millions now’ and I say, ‘If you had a million quid to spend on a house, would you buy one that from the surface looks like it’s worth 300 or 400 grand?’ The whole point is that it looks like a totally normal house, but there’s so much more underneath...”

And yes, the neighbours are roundly supportive of having a YouTube icon building military grade fun and games next door. I mean, if they ever got cheesed off, there’s no palaver trying to prove what he’s up to. Just send a YouTube link to the usual address.