The Man Behind evilution

I have met quite a few smart owners at several meets, a few have been relatively normal, many are strange to say the least. It does seem that the smart attracts nutters.

Meets

I have been to the North West smarties meet and I was the only one without an accent, nice people, more interested in food than the cars it seems though. Funniest person there was definitely Phil (phildeperv), sick man.

Central Southern meet was another trek out into crossbreed-ville but they were a nice bunch, probably the only ones in a 50 mile radius whose Mum’s and Dad’s weren’t brother and sister. Gav and Justin were a funny team, Gav can talk about smarts all night and Justin can rant about 80’s board games like a pro.

Billing was a big disappointment, loads of people, all staying in their own groups. Loads of missing stalls and sod all to do. Got sunburnt and was kept up most of the night by the noisy Scots. (Sam and BB, you know who you are).

Which leads me to the Kent meet, the meet closest to me and the one I continuously missed without fail every month. At first it didn’t really appeal to me, they had known each other for a long time and both the websites seemed quite cliquey but eventually I went along to see what was going on. Apart from the pub smelling like a cross between 1000 laser printers going full pelt and open heart surgery it was a nice place. The people there are wide ranging and just about safe to be let out on their own.

Alan from T1ny.tv was there (his car is mad), he is like a mad scientist with absolutely no fear and a heap of talent. Tiny and myself meet up regularly to brainstorm crazy schemes.

The Kent meet became the Evilution monthly discussion meet where we all came up with crazy time consuming plans for the site that OTV eventually has to spend hours working on, poor guy.

This meet moved a few times before coming to an end when myself and OTV moved to Essex.

S2Smarts are always great meets. Myself and OTV attend almost all of these and quite often trade a few goods as Smartmods. These are either open days with BBQs or an evening session where you can learn about specifics such as general maintenance or modifications.

Photos

This is me at Billing. When Tom from Spotty Badger said he wanted to give me face make-up for a photo shoot for a smart calendar I wasn’t very convinced, by the time he was ready to start I had supped a few too many beers and it seemed a great idea. Took about 15 minutes to put on and 2 hours of scrubbing to get off.

It’s quite a good look for me I think, the people also camping at the same site certainly thought so when I was in the toilet block trying to get the make-up off. Everytime I started taking it off people kept stopping me so they could go get a friend.

OK, this is me without the make-up, I can assure you, this is how I usually look (not normally in Berlin though).

I’m glad it was taken in black and white as I was rather sunburnt that day.

Biography

History

Born May 26th 1975 in a hospital in London. The hospital (Russell Stoneham) was on the Crayford and Erith border so in its time it was classed as either London or Kent. It was destroyed and replaced by flats as most things are these days.

Hated school, hated university, just generally hated people trying to teach me stuff. I could teach myself things very easily and enjoyed doing so. I’d always been very “hands on” and was always taking things apart when I was young.

I very rarely cried as a baby, I just laid there. At 6 months I was diagnosed as being bored so I was given countless things to keep me interested, things I could make, break and do. My Dad and his brothers were all professional tradesmen, they’d have a go at plumbing, wiring, glazing, building, pretty much anything that involved tools.

When I was 1 I was a few breaths away from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when the heating in my parents house blocked up. I was blue when I was taken from the house but pulled through but there’s a chance I suffered from a slight brain injury.

I started off working in a DIY store on the checkouts. Man I hated that job, I wanted to be on the shop floor learning, helping and building things. Luckily that happened and for 10 years I worked for most DIY store chains in the UK, on the shop floor and as a manager although managing others was never my strong point.

In my spare time I would code, hack and crack computer games on the Amiga.

In 2000 I passed my driving test at the age of 25. I know that’s late but I didn’t need to drive before then. My first car was a 1996 Fiat Punto Sporting 1.6 and considering it was a Fiat, it was really quite reliable. I got into cars in a big way, learnt as much as I could about the Punto and modified mine.

It was the same year I first saw the smart, it was in a magazine and I knew I wanted one. I went to a dedicated smart dealer (remember those) in London and stood staring at a city coupe for hours, I really wanted one. I tried to get credit for one but was refused as I had no credit score at all. I had no loans and no credit cards so I was an unknown risk so they wouldn’t let me have one. This setback wouldn’t stop me.

When the smart started appearing in the UK in RHD in 2001 I started paying more attention. I got on the forums and started learning everything I could about them as I wanted knowledge for when I owned one. What I immediately noticed was the distinct lack of basic knowledge about cars in general. Stuff I had previously learned about my 1st car was still very relevant to the smart. I realised that people thought the smart was unlike anything else out there when it’s really just packaged differently. People who owned them were 1st time modifiers being lead by people who didn’t really have much of a clue. It wasn’t unusual for a group of people to talk through a problem or idea on the forums and end up at a conclusion that was clearly wrong. These errors became facts the more they were told.

In 2002 I went to my 1st smart meeting which was the opening of smart in Bluewater (Kent). Smart paid for us all to have food at Pizza Express which was nice. I met a lot of people who owned smarts and also met the guy who ran smart at the time. It was around the time they had announced the Roadster so I spoke to him about that a lot.
By the end of the meet I was adamant that I was going to get a smart and after talking to the prolific modifiers on the smart scene, I was pretty damn sure I had more knowledge and could make an impact in the smart world.

And So It All Began

In late 2002 I left my last DIY store and started work as a technician on the railway. The job was better, the toys were bigger and I could really push myself to solve engineering problems, not just DIY issues. Most importantly, the pay was better so just over a year later in early 2004 I had saved up enough to go and buy a brand new right hand drive 700cc smart pulse. I had been speaking to a guy who worked at the smart dealer down the road to me and he told me what price I could haggle down to and what I could get thrown in for free. So I did.

£6200 later and I drove away happy in my new smart pure with plenty of ideas for what I was going to do.

As it was a new car for me to work on and no one else really knew anything about the car, I decided it was best if I documented everything I did with photos and a write up. All for my own personal use. It only took a few months for someone to find the website which I was surprised about. I had called it evilution which was my forum name from my Fiat Punto days. I hadn’t put in any tags so I didn’t expect anyone would find it with a web search.

Despite the site being terrible, only consisting of about 30 pages and created in Dreamweaver, it contained knowledge and ideas that smart owners hadn’t considered. I had argued the positives for modified dump valves even though the “experts” had outright said they were bad for the smart (but couldn’t explain why). I explained in simple to understand terms why a normal dump valve was bad and how it could be modified to suit the smart.

After that I examined all the other facts that had been set in stone by previous owners and set out to either confirm or deny these pieces of info but more importantly, explain my findings so that everyone could understand.

Early in 2005, my girlfriend at the time (who also owned a smart) started talking to another smart owner about the website. Initially she just wanted ideas and help to make the site better but after a while, this guy said he would make the site. I wasn’t convinced as I liked the idea of having all the pages saved on my PC but I gave him a chance and it turned out to be the best choice I have made. John (OTV) became an important addition to the site, a business partner and one of my few real friends.

Every year on average (except for a bad year from August 2009) I have managed to add 100 pages a year. That works out to be 2 a week. Pages of info don’t just appear, they take work so it’s of no surprise that previous girlfriends soon get sick of me always doing something on the website, then they bugger off.

In 2007 I bought my first 451. A fortwo passion in all black, non turbo (before MHD). This allowed me to continue my work to cover the new car but I never really fell in love with it like I did with the previous model. I didn’t feel like it had the soul. To me it was just a car. The 5 speed gearbox was 1 speed too few and the MPG was rubbish. Not to mention that, despite being 71bhp, it felt slow compared to my 450 which had 61bhp as standard.

The Black Year

In 2009 my girlfriend left me which wasn’t a great surprise. I spent a lot of time doing my site and she had changed into someone that didn’t compliment my personality any more. The pluses that I took from it was she enrolled OTV into the team and had forced me to learn to spell, construct a sentence, use correct grammar and punctuation.

I met someone else. She had mental and family issues and left me after 2 weeks.

I met someone else (smart owner), she had issues to deal with and left me after 6 weeks. So, dumped 3 times in 2 months, I started wondering if it was me! (lol, of course it was). I got depression, tried to commit suicide by gassing myself in the garage with the 451. Did you know that the catalytic convertor takes out almost all carbon monoxide out of the exhaust gasses, I didn’t. I tried again the next day using my 450 which had the exhaust off already. However it didn’t start because the battery was flat. Had a meltdown at work that night, took a month off work and started meds. Sold the 450 to Mark from Fudgesmart and stopped doing the website.I moved out of my house that had a garage and back into my Mum’s loft. Her house didn’t have a garage.

So for the next year, very little was added to the website simply because I had no room to play with the car and I just couldn’t be fucking bothered. Nothing interested me at all. All I did was sleep and work.

On The Mend

I moved to Braintree in Essex for a while in 2010 which is when I bought a Roadster coupe from a guy in Norfolk.
I rented 2 separate garages and slowly started adding info to the site again. The commute to my place of work was way too far so I moved to a cottage in Boreham near Chelmsford. It was much closer and had a double garage.

I signed up for a new doctor and went in for a check up, everything was fine. I’d been reading about Aspergers and Autism and a lot of the symptoms rang true so I asked to take an AQ test and scored a 36. So, I have autism of some kind, which explains a lot. After further tests, they decided I had Aspergers which is slightly different to HFA. However, I have learned to function quite normally as weirdos get bullied at school. As the years go on and I get into more of a routine, I find that my social anxiety has got worse and worse. I rarely leave the house except for work and food shopping. If I need to go out to a shop for something out of my routine, it can take days or weeks before I actually have to force myself to actually go. This is why I’m very rarely seen at smart meets.

It also explains why I don’t like holidays (changing routines) and I won’t use a phone to talk to anyone. I have issues forgetting every day words and it’s hard enough for me to read people’s faces in person. By phone, that’s impossible and I forget how to construct understandable sentences.

In April 2011 I bought my all white 451 turbo cabrio. It had been on order since December 2010 when I read about their intention of doing a white tridion. It was the 1st all white 451 delivered to a customer in the UK. I sold the non turbo 451 to Rob at S2smarts for him to use as a courtesy car.

In November 2011 a Polish lorry driver pulled into the side of my turbo cabrio on the M25. I then went and bought a 451 CDI (45 bhp) for 2 reasons. Firstly I needed a car to get to work, secondly, the contract on the turbo cabrio stated a yearly mileage of 12,000 miles, 36,000 miles over the 3 year contract. I was doing 24,000 miles a year so after 3 years I would have been stung for about £6000 if I wanted to hand the car back. It made sense to just buy a diesel and save on fuel and wear & tear on the cabrio.

A few years later, the CDI just killed itself on the way to work. It has since just sat at S2smart waiting for me to fix it. The rocker for inlet valve 1 popped off. Years later I just scrapped it.

In November 2012 I moved again, on my own and much closer to work. Still in Essex but a nice area called Bulphan. This house had a workshop in the garden, approximately the same size as a triple garage. This allowed me plenty of room to play. The main problem was, living on your own in a nice area isn’t cheap so although I had the room to perform weird and wonderful new things to teach people how to fix their cars, I didn’t have the money to do anything. The site was updated with whatever I could afford to do just to keep it fresh. A few people had been saying for years to charge a small fee to access the site but I really didn’t think anyone would actually pay. So I started at only £10 for the year and only made very technical pages subscription only. The money really helped me add new page to the site. The more I added, the more people joined.

I bought a CAT B write off 54bhp CDI with the intention of using the engine in my 45bhp CDI. However, after seeing the damage, I decided to fix it and it has worked flawlessly for 3 years. The Government have since changed the law so CAT B cars cannot be put back on the road.

In early 2016 I was messed around by my landlord. 2 years previously I had shown an interest in buying the house and he said he’d give me the option to buy it in 2 years. When that time came around he started fixing the garden fences and buying a new cooker etc. Not things you’d do if you were interested in selling. I increased the subscription for the site to £15 after a quick poll that no one complained about. This gave me enough revenue to quickly get a small deposit for a house in the area.

By the middle of 2016 I had found a place to buy in the next village along. It wasn’t ideal as it had a single pre-cast garage with a huge hole in the asbestos roof. I made do without a garage for a few months before finding a decent builder to construct the biggest workshop I could afford. In December 2016, that was completed. I may have forgotten to get planning permission but we all know it’s easier to get forgiveness than to gain permission.

Not much was done over the winter but as the weather got better, the walls were painted, the outside got rendered, the wiring, lighting and power was run and air conditioning was installed. The unit also has a heater and air conditioning thankfully.

Gimme All Your Money

For years, the only 2 people I really classed as friends at the time kept saying I should charge a subscription fee to use the site. I just couldn’t imagine that anyone would pay that. I never really thought that the info on the site was that good, especially considering that a lot of what I had done was now in the public domain.

Early 2013, myself and OTV began talking about the best way to fund the site. Running adverts wasn’t really working any more as companies just weren’t renewing. The only option was a yearly subscription.

So in September 2013 we started charging. Initially we looked at doing it on April 1st but the coding over ran. Since then, I haven’t looked back. We have had enough subscribers to move the site onto a dedicated smart server, buy tools and parts to add bench testing of parts to the site and to start saving up for another car.

Being reclusive, Covid lockdown was easy for me. I’d been in training for that shit for decades. They changed our work days so I had more time off I used to work 10 nights in a row and then have 4 nights off and I did that for 20 years. They changed it to 4 nights on and 4 nights off. I made the time count by starting a few other projects. When lockdown finished and we had to go back to the old roster, many of us couldn’t do it. Everyone moved to 5 nights on and 2 nights off. That didn’t work for me as there’s not enough time to change from working nights to sleeping nights and then change back in just 2 days. Since the site was making enough money, in January 2021 I dropped 1 day at work (4 on, 3 off) and just paid myself the loss as a dividend through the company.

In 2021 we increased the subscription to £20 which we thought was still very reasonable. We also added a 6 month option for £15 for people who wanted to save a bit of cash. Unfortunately the site became very popular, mainly due to normal forums not being used and FaceBook groups being full of gobshites with no clue but give out replies anyway. We literally went back 20 years in time to no one knowing what they were talking about. Also, the cars are getting old and failing more so in turn, more people signed up. That’s not the unfortunate part, that came when I busted through the VAT threshold and the Government decided it wanted an extra 20% of the money I make. So sadly I had to increase all of the subscriptions by 20% to cover it.

These days, the main thing that gives me depression is dealing with accounts. My current accountants are useless. They speak to me like I know all about accounting. I have no idea.I also have no clue about how the new evilution website works now it got moved to WordPress. It’s a lot of code held together with other people’s plug-ins. These quite regularly stop doing what they should be doing. Nothing is simple any more. So instead of just answering emails and adding stuff to the website, half of my time is now taken up with book keeping, accounting and trying to get things to work properly.

In July 2023, despite being busy AF with everything else, I decided to make my own life harder by starting to post proper videos on YouTube. There are 3 types of people who own cars, people who modify, people who just drive their car and people who like to watch other people modify and drive their cars. The website covers the modifiers but there’s a large market of people who should be working but waste time watching shit on YouTube. So I started my channel but it hasn’t really taken off. There are several other smart YouTubers with really low rent content with more subscribers than me. I’ll keep trying for a while and then just give up on it if it doesn’t pick up.

evilution on YouTube – please subscribe.

The Future

Obviously I don’t know the future but the plan is to carry on working, sleeping and playing with smarts. The idea is to put all of my spare money onto the mortgage and pay the house off ASAP. Then I can save up a good deposit, sell this place and move up to Norfolk. The idea is to get a massive farm. She wants horses and I want a warehouse to play cars in. That’ll happen in 2030 when I retire at 55.

Initially I would/could only add things if I was going to do something or if something broke and needed fixing. Luckily now I have 1 or 2 spare cars that don’t mind being taken apart for no real reason (I asked them, they are OK with it). As long as I always have a working car to get to work in, I’m happy.

Apart from the obvious new fixes and repairs, I’m going to take new photos to replace the older photos which were smaller, lower resolution and generally a poorer quality. Older photos had been edited with shit software too. Thankfully I came across Gigapixel which could upscale photos so that saved me taking all the photos again.

And that’s where we are so far. October 2024.