When Cassidy the Kitten was brought to Shelly Roche without his hind legs and with a life-threatening infection. No one gave the little guy good odds to make it through his near-fatal condition. The kitten was born feral and left behind injured in the forest with his brother Topper for nine weeks, until he was found, emaciated, by a person who lived nearby. But Cassidy has what Roche calls the ‘fighting heart of a dragon’, and the kitten has defied his initially poor chances to go on and survive his infection and disability. But Roche still wanted to find a way to bring mobility into Cassidy’s life, and she found a solution from an unexpected source that helped get Cassidy rolling around in a custom 3D printed kitten wheelchair!
The 3D printed wheelchair was designed by two Canadian students from Walnut Grove Secondary School, who saw Roche’s call for help in manufacturing a prosthetic for Cassidy on her website, TinyKittens.com. The students, Josh Messmer and Isaiah Walker, suggested to Roche that they create a 3D printed model of a tiny wheelchair to help the kitten get around.
And, so, using their school’s MakerBot Replicator 2, the two students were able to create a tiny rolling device to be placed beneath Cassidy’s underside. The two students also recognized that they could continually scale up the 3D model of their kitten wheel chair as Cassidy grows, making it relatively convenient to produce bigger prints. These two bright students were able to fully model and manufacture a 3D printed wheelchair, which Cassidy used on camera in the heartwarming CTV News Vancouver video.
