BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01852 I took the Christmas tree down today and with it gone there was room in the living room for yet another rocking chair. This one is from my side of the family. So now we have two rocking chairs in the living room.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01851 Allison has been subbing in Kindergarten for a few weeks now. She’s stepped up and is taking on this role like a champ. However, it is a stressful job to do because the kids need so much and because Allison cares so much. So, to wind down at night she’s been doing some relaxing coloring when not creating things on her new Cricut.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01850 I have my 3D printer and Allison has a new Cricut. She bought herself a Cricut with the gift cards that she received at Christmas and can now do a whole bunch of projects for school and for home. Eva is excited about this as well because she’s got some plans on things that she wants to make, too.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01849 Another post about 3D Printing, yes, once again. Tis has become so much fun to do and last night I took some tiny Axolotls that were printed with multicolor filament to give to some of my co-workers for their kids. When I got home in the morning I set up the printer to print this set of mini dragons. I plan on keeping a few and painting them and giving a few to the kids so that they can paint them as well. I found a whole bunch of other cute little animals as well. I may print more of them for the kids to paint as well.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01848 I finished my 3D print of Iron Man for my wall last night. IT took 5 hours and two tries to get right but now that it is done I am trying to decide what to do next. Should I just spray paint it a metallic black to make it more of a shadow box type piece of art or do I prime it and paint it iron man’s signature colors istead? Do I add in some LEDs so that parts of it light up? I’m trying to decide exactly what I’d like to do. I think I may look into how I could hide the wires within the print itself in the future to really make the lights work well. To do that, though I’m going to have to learn much more on how to create 3D print files. My toughest decision, however is where to put this on my walls.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01848 I finished off the red/blue/green filament in the 3D printer today by printing tiny axolotls and fidget devices or Andy. It then changed to the large roll of grey filament. I searched for something to print while I worked. The printer really warms up my office so that is nice in the winter. I found a wall decoration of Iron Man and I was able to scale it up to the full size of my printer’s hotbed. When I started it the first time I saw that it was printing too fast and making mistakes. So I changed some of the parameters and had it print slower and then it printed much better. I captured today’s photo at the midway point of the print. I liked how the print looked about 4 layers into the print as in the image below. I really like how this came out. It took 5 hours to print.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01847 Because the handle for Kirby’s Rainbow sword was so small I thought that I would take the handle that I created for a dagger that Eva wanted for her cosplay. That dagger did not work right because the blad was printed in 4 parts that did not go together right so I still had the handle parts. I glued it together and then added it to Kirby’s Rainbow sword. The problem is that when I was cutting off the handle I cracked the blade where it was attached to the crossbar of the sword. I glued it back together but it was no longer strong and Andy picked it up and it immediate cracked again. I sanded it down and attempted to put it back together but there is now a huge gap that I will again attempt to fill in and then I’m going to have to paint the whole thing with the primer spray paint and we’ll see if we can salvage this for a prop for Eva. It probably won’t have that fancy multi color filament showing though. But maybe I can make part of it still work for the de...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01847 I’ve printed a few 3D swords and each one has had to be glued together. Andy’s sword has a very distinctive curve in it because it didn’t dry properly after being glued. So, I wanted to be able to print an entire blade in one shot. I also wanted to see what it would look like with the multicolor filament. My Sensei suggested that I search for Kirby’s rainbow sword and this is that sword. The thing is, the handle is super tiny. I have some ideas on what do do to make this a serviceable accessory.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01846 Allison made a homemade chicken pot pie tonight that was a huge hit with the family. Andy couldn’t get enough but we had to lim them to one slice so that we could enjoy it another night this week. We’ll be adding this to the winter rotation of meals.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01845 I’ve been 3D Printing anything I can search for. Eva has been working on some Pop Tab chainmail for a while now. I keep every pop tab that I come along. She’s got a ton of them now. I saw that people had made some 3D printed chainmail so I figured I’d try it out. This is a very small sample print because I had attempted a much larger print and it failed. As it is this did not work as I would have wanted it to work. It was too fragile. But it moves around in a really cool way so Andy claimed it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01844 I used to love these cookies when I was a kid. They’d be around for the Christmas season. It seems that Eva is also a fan of them because we had gotten an off brand set of cookies from our Imperfect Foods order and when they were all gone Eva was sad to see them go. so, Allison ordered this tin from Amazon so that we could continue to enjoy them. Quiet day here today. No more big issues int eh basement. I didn’t end up sleeping that well and tried the trick of listening to my audio book to get back to sleep but that didn’t work so I just ended up listening to the book with my eyes closed. I don’t think I missed much so I don’t think I slept any. Allison made a lasagna for dinner tonight and that was very good. I tried to print out 3D Printed chainmail tonight but it did not set up correctly so I scrapped the print. We’ll see what I need to do to make it work properly.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01843 Recently I’ve been printing with multicolor filament. I purchased a 4 pack of filaments that each had multi colors. Red/Blue, Green/blue, Red/Yellow/Blue and Red/Green/Blue. I’ve used the Red/Yellow/Blue to make the Axolotl for Andy and I used the Green/Blue for the steampunk octopus for me, but which was claimed by Andy. So Andy has been benefiting from my continued printing endeavours. I’m very happy with how this Axolotl came out. It was a very long print and maybe I could have made it print quicker but it was very well done as far as quality. I think the next thing that we need to do is learn how to make our own models on the printer. We’ll be learning from the programs at TinkerCAD to get the basics down. While the printer has been doing well my house decided that it had been quiet for too long and the pipe near the street backed up and I had to go on poop cleanup patrol tonight before work. Rather gross. Now I definitely have to dig up around that pip...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01842 I am fascinated by segmented 3D Prints. I’ve found many dragons that are 3D printed in place and when you take them off the hotbed they are completely joined together and can move about. I decided to print this one according to what the creator said as far as settings. Because of that the print is going to take a total of 18 1/2 hours. It is printing very slowly. The photo is from around 14 hours into the print. I’ve got 3 1/2 hours left to go at this point but once it is done it is going to look really cool. I am using a 3 color filament that is metallic. The three colors are red, blue and yellow so this will have a whole rainbow look to it and it is going to be perfect for Andy.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01841 I 3D Printed this Steampunk Octopus today. The regular octopus doesn’t look as cool. This one is awesome. It is hollow in the middle so you can spin it on your finger and the arms twirl around like one of those carnival rides. Between printing this one and the other octopus I used up all the Blue/Green filament. I had to do a change of the filament and when I did some little bit of it got stuck in the feeder tube. I had to take part of the printer apart in order to get that bit removed so that I could load the printer with the triple color filament. Speaking of taking things apart, I took apart the snowblower so that I could figure out what was wrong with it. The auger worked but the snowblower would not move forward or backwards. Somehow a belt got dislodged and I was able to get it put back on. Hopefully it will stay in place until the end of the winter season and then I’ll get it tuned up and prepared for next year.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01840 continuing with the 3D Printing theme this week I received my package for 4 different multi color filments today. these rolls are smaller than the ones I have been using so far. I started with the green/blue filament because I’m printing segmented octopus figures. I started with a simple one but also found something really cool for tomorrow’s print.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01839 I keep looking for things to print and I found a cute baby Axolotl to print for Andy to paint. andy loves Axolotls and this looked like fun. This whole week has been about lots of fun 3D printing. Tomorrow I am getting some multicolor filament and am looking forward to what I can build with that.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01838 I’ve been working on these swords for a few weeks now. I’ve had some setbacks with the Riptide sword because the build was rather fragile. I’d try and make the walls stronger the next time around. The Sword of omens came together rather well but I have lots of sanding to do on that one. I took both swords and added some wood filler to them to fill the cracks and then repainted them to seal that in some more. I hope that will help keep them together and make them stronger. We shall see. I also picked up some paints and more so that I could start the painting process for them. I am still contemplating giving the sword to my friend’s daughter to have her paint it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01837 General Mills recently sent me a bunch of new cereals and I’m trying them while at work. Tonight I tried out the Berry Swirl Lucky Charms. These have a light berry taste and the shapes are pure Lucky Charms. I’m looking forward to trying the 5 other cereals that they sent me, too.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01836 I’ve been printing a lot of things witht he 3D printer lately. I discovered a set of mushroom shelves that I could print for the kids. These are wall shelves of varying shapes and sizes. I printed one today so that I could see how it looked. It came out really nice and Eva is super excited about them and even has some ideas on what she’d like to do with many of them. The great thing about the 3D printer is that we just need the filament and the time, it has a very low cost to make these. She plans to paint the underside ribs of the mushrooms with glow in the dark paint so that her room has a cool night look.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01835 I did some work today on the swords that I’ve printed. they both needed to be assembled so I got them all glued together. Then after they dried I sprayed them with the fill primer that I purchased earlier this week. I’m going to give it a couple of coats this weekend but I still need something else to fill the gaps that I am seeing. Even though the prints were pretty precise they were not precise enough and there are gaps. I tried printing another thing for Eva. While it should have been fairly easy to print it was not. I worked on the options for printing and finally got a viable print this evening. Eva will be painting that sometime soon as well.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01834 For the next five weeks we have Sensei Saunders as our instructor and today we had sparring in both my class and Eva’s class. I enjoy sparring but I need so much work at it. I tend to do the same thing over and over so have to learn to vary my techniques. In the afternoon I took Eva to her class and at the last five minutes they sparred, too. Eva did really well. I wanted to snap a picture of her actually sparring but only managed to catch her as she was finishing up. Sparring can be very tiring and Eva did several rounds with various kids. She’s got great form and is doing a great job.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01833 Today was Allison’s birthday. We celebrated a couple of ways. Allison had a 2 hour delay this morning so I took the kids to school and then took Allison to Cafe Locale for breakfast. We laughed because we’d be going right back to the same strip mall for dinner that night for Allison’s birthday dinner. Breakfast was nice and when it was done Allison went to school and I went home. There was so much water everywhere and it was the most apparent when I took andy to go climbing. I had to find a way around our normal route to get Andy to Rock Spot. Luckily Rock Spot is up on a hill and it did not get flooded. Below them, however was a road that looked like a pond. I saw some cars and trucks drive through it but I was not gonna chance it. When we got home from climbing we all went to Blue Moon for dinner. Blue Moon is a Thai restaurant that we enjoy very much. We had a bunch of great items to enjoy. We also had some leftovers to bring home and enjoy over the next...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01832 It snowed over the weekend and the morning skies have looked incredible since. I was out warming up the cars this morning and the sky looked so beautiful. I had to stop and take a photo. The snow will be gone tomorrow because a big rainstorm is on the way and all this will be replaced by the drab brown that we’ve seen for weeks. Back to regular class this week after buddy week last week. We’re learning some new techniques and for the next six weeks we have Sensei Saunders teaching. Today Sensei explained how to do a sprawl properly. I have never learned how to do this technique properly. It made so much more sense when he taught it. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning from Sensei Brochu and before him Sensei Wilson but when I started these were things you just did by watching how other people did them. Each instructor has given their own spin on things and each one has taught me so much along the way. Even Eva is warming up to Sensei Saunders and his teachi...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01831 We cleaned off the dining room table recently and the bottle of Cholula ended up with the Nativity scene. We have been taking to call the bottle the 4th Wise Man. The kids get a kick out of that. One of those family jokes that I hope will live on.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01830 the first snow of 2024 has fallen and it was a wet snow that came overnight and throughout this day. I worked last night so I slept most of today. andy and Eva went out and shoveled the driveway and back patio as well as cleared out Joanie’s driveway. When I woke up Andy helped me to clear off the cars and we re-shoveled the driveway and Joanie’s driveway and then all of the sidewalk. Why didn’t I use the snowblower? Well, it started and the auger spun but the drive did not engage and so it was impossible to move through the snow. I didn’t have time to try and figure it out before work so we did the sidewalks and everything else by hand. Luckily it was light snow and there wasn’t a whole ton of it to do. I’ll have to figure out what the issue is sometime this week. that being said, the kids were a big help.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01829 Ever since getting andy a 3D Printed Dragon for their birthday I wanted to print one myself. This is a ghost dragon and I went and scaled it up a bit. The print is going to take 10 hours or so. It is cool to see how these things get completed. Since I am working overnight I can see it as it is built.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01828 My favorite book series is a series of books by author Shayne Silvers. Shayne Silvers has several great characters but the main story revolves around a wizard named Nate Temple. Shayne has written over 35 books since 2018 or so. I started reading (listening on Audible) over a year ago. I finished relistening to all of the books this morning and I’m starting to red the one book that is not yet on Audible: Boilermaker. The good thing is that this book continues after what had happened in the last book that I listened to, Snakebite. In the books Nate has a surly Alicorn named Grimm and from all descriptions of Grimm I thought that this LEGO Alicorn from the Dreamz sets looked exactly like I would picture Grimm. Although he has feathers with red tips and I;’m not sure if I can recreate that to make it look closer to that look. I also think the character on Grimm’s back looked very much like Nate with his Horseman of Hope mask.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01827 This is the Sword of Omens fully printed and I even found craft dowels to add to it to strengthen it. I still have a lot of work to do to actually assemble it. I do have to reprint part of the handle because the first time I printed it the bottom curled up and peeled away from the hotbed. I ended up adding some supports to it so that it would print flat. I also will have to do a lot of sanding and also add some filler to it before it can be printed. I also noticed that one piece does not quite fit into another and I’ll need to sand that down as well. I’ll also have to sand the larger dowel down in order for it to fit through one smaller part of the handle. Once I have it all assembled I’ll see if the Prestons’ daughter Cady would like to paint it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01826 Today was a big day for Andy. I took Andy to a day of ADHD testing. We were there for several hours while Andy did a series of tests and met with a doctor. Andy did really well and when we were done we went to Rock Climbing because a new session began. We got there pretty early and Andy was able to do some climbing around the bouldering area. Andy has new kids in their class this time around and a new instructor. We’re a bit sad that Emmett is no longer their instructor but the new one seems okay so far. Andy had a good time but really scraped up one of their palms. Not fun. We’re going through bandaids all over the place here. I cut myself taking the supports off Eva’s Totem of Undying. Really thin like a papercut.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01825 I finished printing all the parts of The Sword of Omens today and began a print for Eva. The kids went back to school today and we were back at Krav for classes, too. During the day I had the printer printing several things or rather one thing multiple times because I needed to size it properly. This is a Totem of Undying that is from Minecraft. Eva wanted one for her cosplay. The original file was incredibly small and I had it printing with a bunch of other things but the fans blew it away into a spaghetti monster. Then I scaled it up but not enough. I ended up printing it twice at that size and then scaled it up even further to the correct size for Eva. This is the correct size printing and there are several supports to help with the printing.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01824 My first print of 2024 was the Thundercats emblem to add to The Sword of Omens. However, this print above was the second print. The first one did not have proper supports to keep it in place on the hotbed of the printer. The fans blew it away and then the extruder continued to pump out filament and made a spaghetti monster. sort of fitting for the start of the year. Don’t forget to use support. Not just for 3D printing.