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Homemade Hoverbike

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A British shed inventor built a flying bike out of paramotor engines, and somehow it actually got off the ground.

Colin Furze has made a career out of building things that shouldn’t work, but the Homemade Hoverbike might be the one that pushed his shed operation the furthest. Released on April 28, 2016, the video shows Furze straddling an open aluminum frame powered by two paramotor engines, throttling up, and hovering a few feet off his own backyard. No seat, no brakes, no stabilizers — just a man, a frame, and two spinning propellers close enough to his legs that he called the whole thing a “human blender.”

• Furze built the hoverbike in partnership with Ford’s “Unlearn” mobility campaign, choosing the project after fans submitted more than 13,000 suggestions.
• The frame runs on two Polini Thor 190 Evo two-stroke paramotor engines, mounted horizontally front and back and spinning propellers in opposite directions to cancel out torque — the same basic logic as a tandem-rotor Chinook helicopter.
• With no seat, rudder, or stabilizers to save weight, Furze steered purely by shifting his body weight while gripping handlebar throttle controls, and still achieved sustained low-altitude hovering.

Built Without an Engineering Degree

Furze has no formal mechanical engineering training — he’s a plumber by trade who turned his garden shed into one of YouTube’s most watched workshops. The hoverbike came together over several weeks, welded and wired together with an aluminum frame that had to stay as light as possible. Every gram mattered: adding a seat, a windshield, or conventional flight controls would have added drag and weight the two paramotor engines couldn’t overcome.

That stripped-down approach is exactly why the machine looks so alarming on camera. The propellers sit unshielded, inches from Furze’s legs as he straddles the frame like a motorcycle. He leaned into the danger rather than hide it, describing the build bluntly rather than dressing it up for the cameras.

“Unhinged flying bike/human blender.”

Engineers Resolved the Torque Problem

The core engineering challenge with any single-rotor aircraft is torque — the spinning blades want to spin the whole vehicle in the opposite direction. Furze solved it the way full-size helicopter designers solve it for tandem-rotor aircraft: two propellers, one facing forward and one facing back, spinning opposite directions so the forces cancel out. It’s the same principle behind a Chinook, just built with paramotor parts in a British garage instead of a defense contractor’s factory.

With that balance sorted, Furze could focus the throttle controls on the handlebars purely on lift and hover height, steering the craft by leaning his weight across the open frame — no rudder pedals, no cyclic stick, nothing but instinct and momentum.

Putting It to the Test

The video documents real flight tests, not simulations — Furze hovering across his own backyard and then an open field, gaining altitude a few feet at a time. He pushed the demonstration further by mounting neon lights and Roman candle fireworks to the frame during flight, turning a already-dangerous test into something closer to a fireworks show with a person underneath it. It’s the kind of stunt that only makes sense once you’ve already accepted the premise of straddling two spinning propellers with no seatbelt.

The clip drew heavy coverage from outlets including The Verge and Popular Mechanics, who framed it as classic eccentric British shed engineering — equal parts impressive and terrifying, built by someone with zero formal training in the field he was essentially inventing on the fly.

Furze’s hoverbike never became a product Ford sold or a vehicle anyone else tried to replicate at home — it was always the demonstration, not the prototype. But it sits alongside other backyard and boutique attempts at personal flight, like the electric Jetson One, as proof that the fantasy of hopping on a hovering bike is closer to real than most people assume, even if Furze’s version needed a fireworks display just to make the danger feel proportionate to the fun.