Amputee saves £35,000 by building his own prosthetic leg using parts bought online

Mr Young lost his right leg below the knee only last year after a very old football injury caused a bone infection.

After four-and-a-half years of pain, Mr Young decided it was the "best option" for what he needed. However, the NHS was only able to provide him with a standard prosthetic leg, not a running leg.

Mr Young explained: "You are given a leg from the NHS, and depending on how active you want to be, there's a limit on what they can do. I wanted to do a 5K run for the Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester, and they can't provide me with a running leg, so they can't provide me with a blade.

"So the best option was to wait a year, which I didn't want to do, I wanted to do the run in July. And so I thought the best option would make my own."

Revealing how it helped him mentally with his recovery following his amputation, Mr Young added: "It keeps my mind active, because you could be sat recovering for six months, and I'd already done a year's recovery from an older injury where I'd lost a toe in July 24th. So I didn't want to do that again.

"So I thought I'd make my own leg and start running again."

Asked how he came up with the idea of how to create his running leg, Mr Young revealed his is of an engineering background, saying: "It's research, research, research, diagrams, working out, talking to people, finding out the parameters of how much longer it has to be to sort of be the effective option for everything.

"And the one I made is from bits from eBay, Amazon, but they're proper prosthesis parts. There's the spring back foot, that is carbon fibre, and there's different categories and weight classes depending on how heavy you are, is depending what category you've got to go for.

"The other part is the tensioned hydraulic part, that's the bit that controls an energy return from a step, it gives a bit of spring and cushioning. It's proper hydraulics, and then the top part is just the metalwork which connects to the socket, and the socket is the most important part."

Astounded by his engineering, Stephen asked Mr Young how he was able to achieve such a creation for only £100.

Mr Young responded: "It's all secondhand parts, it's all parts that other people have used. And they've either had newer parts given to them so they didn't need it, or it was parts that they didn't use.

"There's tons and tons of stuff in Germany, America, all secondhand parts on eBay. You can find what you need and then you can go to other places like AliExpress and pick up new forged parts as well."

Breaking down the cost of each part, Mr Young told the People's Channel: "The whole thing was under £100. The foot and the hydraulics I think were about £60, and then the metalwork and top bits were about £40."

Asked by Anne how it felt trying his new leg for the first time, Mr Young admitted: "It was weird, because it's a lot longer than what you're used to.

"And because I've been wearing this for sort of 10, 12 hours at a time now because I wear it all day, putting something that was a lot taller on was strange, but it's actually really comfortable."

Admitting it was trial and error making it work for his running, he added: "So the problem is when you run with a blade is it's a lot longer, so it allows spring back, and so you tend to have a longer foot.

"So you'll see people who've got it one leg or runners and it will be one knee pointing forward, so when you run, actually all the weight going through you actually levels it out, so it was a bit of trial and error working out the length of the tube I needed."

Planning his next big run for this summer, Mr Young concluded: "It's just building up the miles now, 3rd of July this year is the plan, so it's getting the miles in. It'll be under a year since I had the amputation and it'll be two years since I had the toe cut off and they told me I wouldn't be able to run again, so it's a bit of an 'I can'. It's only an amputation, it's only skin and bone."

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