For many 13-year-olds, summer vacation means sleeping late, playing video games, spending time with friends or enjoying a few months without homework.
For Zac Waters, it meant something very different.
The teenager from Lehi, Utah, devoted roughly 300 hours of his summer to designing, printing, testing and assembling a custom mobility chair for a 21-month-old girl he had never met.
There was no school assignment waiting to be graded.
There was no competition trophy at the end.
There was no requirement telling him he had to do it.
Zac simply realized that a hobby he loved — 3D printing — could be used to make everyday life easier for someone else.
And once he understood that possibility, he decided to act on it.
By the end of the project, hundreds of hours of experimentation had turned into something much more meaningful than another object produced by a 3D printer.
It had become a customized mobility device designed specifically for a small child who needed help moving more independently through the world.
A Hobby Becomes Something More
Zac had already developed a strong interest in 3D printing before taking on the project.
Like many young people learning modern technology, part of his education came from online videos. Reporting on his project says he became interested in 3D printing after watching content about the technology and began experimenting with creating objects himself.
3D printing can initially seem like little more than a fascinating way to create toys, models, gadgets or replacement parts.
A computer-generated design is sent to a printer, which gradually builds a physical object layer by layer.
For a teenager interested in technology, the process provides nearly endless opportunities to experiment.
Zac, however, began thinking about what else those skills could accomplish.
His search eventually led him to MakeGood, a nonprofit organization that develops and shares designs for assistive devices for people with disabilities.
MakeGood describes itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that designs and fabricates assistive products, with many of its digital models available for people to download and 3D print. Its catalog includes wheelchair accessories, adaptive writing devices, walker components, tray tables and mobility equipment.
That discovery changed the direction of Zac’s hobby.
Instead of asking, “What could I print for myself?” he began asking a more important question:
What could I print for someone who actually needs it?
Meeting a Need Without Meeting the Person
Through the MakeGood project, Zac became connected with the need for a mobility chair for a 21-month-old girl.
He did not know her personally.
That detail is what makes the story especially striking.
He was not building something for a younger sister, cousin, classmate or family friend. He was dedicating hundreds of hours to a child who was essentially a stranger to him.
But he knew that she needed mobility support.
That was enough.
The project centered on MakeGood’s 3D Toddler Mobility Trainer, or TMT, a low-cost mobility device designed for children roughly ages one through eight.
MakeGood describes the TMT as a 3D-printed wheelchair intended to give young children greater independent mobility and opportunities to explore their environment. The organization says the design is intended to provide such mobility at a fraction of the cost of many traditional pediatric wheelchair options.
For Zac, however, downloading a design was only the beginning.
The chair had to be adapted to the specific child.
That meant thinking about size, comfort, movement, equipment, growth and everyday use.
It also meant thinking about what might make the chair feel like it belonged to her rather than simply being a piece of medical equipment.
Around 300 Hours of Work
The finished chair did not emerge from a printer all at once.
3D printing is a process.
Individual components have to be designed or adjusted, prepared digitally, printed one piece at a time and inspected.
Some parts can take hours to print.
Some prints fail.
Measurements have to be checked.
Components need to fit together.
If something is wrong, it may need to be redesigned and printed again.
Then comes assembly.
Zac reportedly spent about 300 hours across the summer designing, printing, testing and putting the mobility chair together.
Three hundred hours is difficult to appreciate until it is placed in context.
That is the equivalent of more than seven full 40-hour workweeks.
For a 13-year-old on summer vacation, it represented a huge portion of the time when he could have been doing almost anything else.
But Zac kept returning to the project.
Piece by piece, the chair slowly came together.
The amount of work also highlights something that can be lost when a story like this is summarized in a few sentences online.
The impressive part was not simply that Zac “3D-printed a wheelchair.”
The impressive part was persistence.
A complicated project requires patience when a print does not work.
It requires concentration when a measurement is slightly wrong.
It requires willingness to repeat tasks that may already have taken hours.
And it requires continuing after the excitement of starting has worn off.