Stansfield has a degree in
aeronautics from
Bristol University and, before his television career, worked in a
Czech school, as a
shepherd in the
Australian outback, and briefly in
stand-up comedy. Stansfield was an on-screen
ballistics expert for the television show
Scrapheap Challenge and went on to become a permanent part of the engineering team for subsequent series. Among his inventions are a
compressed-air powered motorcycle, and boots that walk on water (for which he won a
New Scientist prize). In 2010, Stansfield used
vacuum cleaners to create "
Spider-Man style" climbing gloves, climbing 30 feet up a brick wall. He also drove a modified 1988
Volkswagen Scirocco 210 miles from
London to
Manchester using
coffee granules for fuel. In 2013 Stansfield sustained injuries during filming of a segment for the series
Bang Goes the Theory. The segment was about the safety of front-facing and rear-facing seats in car crashes. Stansfield was in a cart which crashed, simulating the impact of a car hitting a lamppost and suffered from spine and brain injuries as a result. It emerged in court that the BBC had been warned of the dangers by crash test experts but this information was never passed to Stansfield. ==Filmography==