BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01880 I finally finished the 3D Printed ABD Logo. I was able to get the full version of the Shaper3D program. With that program I was able to export the full high quality version of the file. Now with the new filament I have been able to print some very high quality logos. I’ll be painting them so that I can give them to the staff at ABD as Christmas ornaments.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01879 I took Andy for an eye doctor’s appointment today. Andy’s eyes are in good shape. Andy has glasses but the prescription is weak. Andy doesn’t necessarily need the glasses to see in school but enjoys how they look on their face. It find it funny that Andy is out of focus in this photo and I did not intend it to be that way.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01878 Well, looks like I spoke much too soon regarding printing the Iron Man arm blaster. It even looks like the moment after I took yesterday’s photo the print failed and it failed hard. The printer continued to print all night long and made a giant spagetti ball. I’ve been having lots of trouble lately with the printer. I am not sure if it was the spool of filament of things have been set improperly. In the afternoon I finished out the roll of filament. I then factory reset the printer and loaded some new filament. That seemed to do the trick and it made things work much better for the printer. The new filament seems so much better. It was probably for the best that the print failed because it was too small to fit my hand inside. I’m going to have to split the print in half and make it larger in order to make it something I could actually get on my hand. Hopefully I can make that work.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01877 I found something that I’ve wanted to start printing,an Iron Man arm blaster. This would be a 26 hour print and I’d have to change out the filament at some time during the print. Once printed this should be large enough for me to fit my hand inside. It should look cool once it is painted.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01876 Andy asked me to make a few more fidget blocks for their friends at school but I’m having some major difficulty with the black filament. It seems more brittle than other filaments and these fidgets are not printing properly. This one is not complete. There was a piece that did not print properly so it will not make a proper rectangle. However, it still can be used as a fidget device. Maybe Andy will still be able to use it for one of their friends.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01875 Eva’s cat, James is her constant companion when she is home. When she’s hanging out in her room James will plop right down on to her lap no matter how much room is available. Allison finds James outside Eva’s room all the time during the night protecting her door. He does love being with her so much and she loves him so much, too.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01874 Eva had me 3D Print this knife for her cosplay costume. I haven’t printed much else this week except for the logo for Americas Best Defense which I gave to Sensei Howard because he got me the logo file and I’ve been talking about it non stop each time I come in for classes. Vacation week has come to an end and it is back to school for everyone next week. We kept it very low key around here this week.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01873 It was school vacation week and because of that we had little to do. this morning Eva went with me to Krav class so that she could have the afternoon to herself. That is what I told her to get her to go and then we proceeded to do a few things in the afternoon like driving lessons, watching Avatar the Last Airbender and lunch at The Burgundian. Allison had suggested having lunch somewhere so we decided up on the Burgundian. They are known for their Liege waffles but they have many other things as well. We enjoyed some burgers and a NAshville hot chicken sandwich. Eva got a great steak meal, too. When lunch was over I took Eva to the La Salette overflow parking lot to give her some time behind the wheel. this is a very large parking lot that is not used that much except for when it is Christmas time and they need it for all the people coming to see the lights. So, we could do what we needed to do without worrying to much about other cars around. I had Eva dr...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01872 We doubled up on time spent with Preston this week. andy and I went to Altitude which is an indoor trampoline park. Preston has been going there a bit with some folks from Karate and asked if Andy wanted to go this week. We met up with Preston and his mom in the afternoon. Both boys got an hour of jumping and they were joined by another kid from Karate named Aiden. the three boys got along together pretty well. they started to konk out before the hour was up, almost did the full hour. Then they wanted to play the arcade games. The parents discussed it and let each boy have $20 on a card so that they could play the games. Andy loves Skee-Ball so that was one that Andy did the most. They also played many other games and even some air hockey. Of course, when the card was out of credits Andy wanted to reload theirs but we’d been there long enough. No sense in overspending on arcade games for prizes we could have gotten for a fraction of the money. It was a nice...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01871 Allison got a Cricut this year and has been using it to make things for her classrooms at school. she has also been making some things for home. She has made this design for our blackboard wall in the kitchen. I think that she’s going to remake the calendar stencil using the cricut and I’ll have to repaint that wall one more time. It will look much cleaner when I redo it. The cricut designs are so sharp and look very good. She’ll be changing that saying each season at this point.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01870 It is February vacation week and we aren’t headed anywhere so I set up a few things for Andy to do with friends. Andy has a friend from when they were in karate. Andy’s friend Preston is the son of my friend Emily. She and I take Krav Maga classes together. Preston has climbed a few times with Andy and this Christmas the Rock Spot location had a sale on 5 passes so I told emily and she got them for Preston. That way we could get together and the boys could climb together. We went over to climb in the early afternoon and the boys did about an hour of solid climbing together. We got there a bit early and Andy did a whole bunch of bouldering to get warmed up. Bouldering still stresses me out even though Andy isn’t going that high. It is my aversion to heights that stresses me out. But Andy is very good at climbing and does a great job every time we go. The boys had a lot of fun climbing together. It is nice seeing Andy spend some time with Preston. They get al...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01869 I've been printing another sword for Eva. this one is the sword that Nico Di Angelo has in the Percy Jackson books. His sword is made of Stygian Iron and it is black. I just changed over to the black filament in the 3D printer so there was no better time to do this than now. The build is a really good one, too. Very secure and most everything fit together very well. The type of sword is a Falcata. I used a bunch of clamps to keep things in place as the glue dries on the pieces. There were a few small gaps so I filed them with some wood filler. that way we can paint and it should cover everything.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01868 I was at Target tonight on my way to the office and I decided to get a new set of headphones for gaming. I’ve gone through so many of these things. The issue is not what I am hearing but rather what other people can hear from me. If you went by the guys that I game with they never hear me that well. There are a couple of reasons for this. The microphone is not close enough to my mouth on my headset and it is fixed so I cannot move it closer. The other reason is that I do not talk loud. I’m hoping that these headphones will work better, it is a good brand and wasn’t super expensive but they weren’t cheap either. I’ll find out how they are the next time I game with my cousin, Shaun.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01867 Last week I was at Five Below because I like to pop in there before going into the office on Saturdays. I saw that they had this Marvel version of Uno and I know how much Andy enjoys Uno so I picked up this set for them. We’ll enjoy it next week during February vacation. andy had a halt day today so I picked them up from school and we went to the Comic book store and out for lunch. The latest issue of the new run of Transformers came out and it was a pretty good story. I love what the new writer and artist is doing with the franchise.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01866 I’ve been playing with the Shapr3D program to get that ABD logo looking the best it can. Still no word on the student discount as of yet and I am trying to hold out printing much of anything at the low quality but I did print this and what is unique about it is that I started with white filament but it ran out and then I switched to the red/blue filament and that ran out so I finished up with the black filament and that was just the last two layers so this mock up looks really fun. I’d need a multi nozzle 3D printer in order to print out in multiple colors properly but I like how this came out even though it is at low quality. I can’t wait to see how it turns out on high quality.I did bring this in and show Sensei Howard. I was going to wait for the very good quality print but I couldn’t wait.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01865 We had a snowstorm yesterday and a good bit of snow fell, nothing like years past but enough to use the snowblower. I liked how the sky looked this morning as I went out to clear off the cars and start them before we made our trips to school. Andy and I only went out once yesterday and because of that we never cleared the snow off the cars. So, I ended up doing that when I went out to start them up. The snow as very frozen and I cleared off huge chunks of it form the cars in giant pieces. So, clearing the snow was fairly easy.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01864 Today is the day before the start of Lent and it is also known as Fasnacht Day. We did not go out and get donuts today with the snowstorm but Allison and Andy made some air fryer donuts using Pillsbury Biscuits and cinnamon sugar. They came out pretty good and we were able to enjoy these on the day before Lent. There as no school today and also no Krav classes so we hung around the house for the day and Andy and I cleared the snow. It was concrete snow so that wasn’t too fun but there wasn’t a ton of it so that made it fairly easy to do.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01863 Now that we have a 3D printer I have to start learning how to use 3D creation programs because there are a few projects that I would like to do. One of those projects is to create some Christmas Ornaments of the America’s Best Defense logo. I asked Sensei howard for some of the digital files of the logo and then I found a program on line called Shapr3D. With that program I was able to create a 3D printable file of the logo but when I went to export it to print on the 3D printer I found that I could only export a low quality file. In order to export a full resolution file I would need to have a pro account. Well, pro accounts are $300 a year and I’m sorry but I’m not paying for that. I looked at this closer and saw that for Students and Educators the program is free. I just needed a .edu email address. Well, no one in the house had one. Luckily, the program allowed us to upload a student ID as verification of being a student so I uploaded Eva’s id and now we...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01862 The teaser trailer for Deadpool and Wolverine came out today and I am very excited for July 26th to arrive. I did not have a Deadpool figure in the red costume, just the purple, so that isn’t really Deadpool but I did want to take a Deadpool photo today because of the trailer. I’m excited for this movie because so many characters will be making cameos in the movie. This should be great to see Wolverine and Deadpool play off each other.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01862 Multicolor filament is perfect for articulated 3D Prints and my favorite thing to print is dragons. There are so many dragon files and I found this one that is a Chinese luck dragon. When it printed it also printed with two large whiskers that are supposed to fit into holes on the nose. However, they did not fit so I didn’t bother to hang on to them. I love how cool this looks as it moves and the colors shift.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01861 I changed out the filament in the 3D printer to that of red/blue and reprinted the Dragon part of the labyrinth puzzle box. I then took painters tape and covered all of the dragon except for the horns. Then I spray painted the whole thing so that the tower portion would be painted a grey or some other tower-like colors. I also wanted to paint up the horns a different color. I used an obsidian metallic paint on the horns. I may add some gold o the horns as well. I’m thinking that I will see if my friend’s daughter would like to print the other Dragon and tower. I have two of them and the other one was just all grey.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01860 Today at Krav class we did sparring and that was a lot of fun. I’m still not that great at it but I am starting to get better. At Jr. Krav today the kids started off with some dizzy bat races. We’ve done this in drills before but this was just for fun. They had two heats of 4 kids each and Eva won her heat so she got to go again against Kori. Eva did her spinning perfectly and then she was off and then splat. She bit it on the mats. Luckily she was laughing so hard along with everyone else. I caught it in video and then extracted the image of right before she hit the mats. For the rest of class Eva did great and she was doing so well at sparring.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01859 I finally got started doing some painting of my 3D prints. I will have to paint things over and over a few times because the one layer is not enough. I’m very excited about painting the Thundercats symbols. I want to make them really shiny and slick. I also started painting the tiny dragon army as well. I recently printed another 11 of them so there are a ton of them to print. I painted some of them with a metallic green paint.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01858 General Mills sent me a huge box of great treats for Valentine’s day. Each treat box is full of things that can be given out as Valentine’s treats to friends and family. I was able to share these with the family and also have Allison take some to school for her aftercare kids.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01857 I continue to work on making new things with the 3D printer. I found a super cool Labyrinth puzzle that also had a cover that was a dragon. I love dragons and so this worked so well for me. However, I made this with supports but the supports were like concrete and were unable to be removed from the first print. I ended up reprinting it without supports and it worked so much better. See what the messed up one looks like. I am going to go and print this one again with the blue/red filament. I think it would look amazing when that is done.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01856 It took a while but we now have a completely printed Riptide sword. Andy has wanted this ever since we got the 3D printer and I did print a different version of the sword but it completely broke and fell apart. So, for the past 28 hours this sword has been printing. This one is much stronger than the others. It also has some holes in each part where you can put pegs to make it stronger. However, when I first printed it the little pegs fell over and screwed up the print. I cut that part off the file and then reprinted just the sword parts. When it came time to assemble this I used part of a lollipop stick to put into the holes. It fit nice and tight. But at the mid-point the holes did not line up properly. It seemed offset by a couple of millimeters. So, I used toothpicks to pit into the holes and then glued the pieces together and then clamped them tight so that the sword fit together. No warping on this one. Andy will be excited ones I spray it down and th...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01855 The other day I saw an post by Bliss Restaurant that today would be National Ice Cream for Breakfast day. I saw that they would have a oreo crusted fried ice cream and I knew I had to go and enjoy that. So, after work I got the family up and awake and out the door before 7:30 so we could go and get that ice cream for breakfast. We were the first people to order ice cream of any kind for breakfast. They were also doing a raffle or sweepstakes for anyone who ordered off the special menu of ice cream. I go the Oreo crusted fried ice cream and Allison got the liege waffle and ice cream. Andy went super plain and got a dish of French Vanilla with whipped cream and a cherry. I was a bit surprised at that when there were so many options for friend ice cream. They even had a fruity pebbles one and I would have thought that Andy would have chosen that. In the afternoon I rode with my parents to the airport so that I could take their car back home. They’re off to Flo...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01854 I have not had great luck printing swords on the 3D printer. Andy wanted the sword from Percy Jackson and I did print one out and assembled it. However, it was too frail and after I glued it together, sprayed it and then started sanding it the thing fell apart. There was far too little material in the build so it had a ton of cracks all the way up and down the thing. I glued it so many different ways and yet it still was a problem. So I found another print and I decided to try that. This one had little pins to help hold the parts of the sword together. Things were going well until one of the little pins fell over. When that happened the printer would continue to try and print the next layer of that pin but had nowhere to put the filament so the filament ended up everywhere and was starting to cause trouble to other parts of the build. I reached in to swipe out the excess filament a couple times and one time I was not quick enough and the printer head hit my...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01853 I was supposed to have a stripe test this morning. The test still happened but I was not there. I don’t like missing stripe tests especially after putting in all the work. However, today it could not be helped. Had some digestive issues all day and so I stayed home. I could not trust that I’d keep it together on the mats. So, instead I did our taxes and filled out all the financial aid forms for Eva’s school next year. They forms had to be in by Feb 3rd and I only got my taxes info today so I figured I’d get it done. At least I accomplished something today. Eva had her strip test and she earned another strip. Not that there was any doubt that she would. She does very well in class. I wasn’t feeling like having much but had to eat something so I made an old standby from my childhood, the toasted cheese.