The Good, Bad and Ugly Experiences of a 3d Printing Newbie: Caravan Project

Caravan Project
This is a series of prints to make up a full caravan set for use in D&D.

Hay Wagon
204min/6.77m/$0.51
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:800707

Draft Horse
59min/2.96min/$0.22
https://www.shapeways.com/product/5BY3QR7MG/draft-horse?optionId=59691060&li=user-profile

Barrels
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32016

Treasure Chest
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:74041

Crates
25min/1.58m/$0.12
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:45107

The Hay Wagon by Kevinrau is amazing. Lots of detail and a great size for D&D miniatures.
Because this model has many overhangs, you're going to have to add supports.

In Flashprint if you add supports, there will be A LOT of them! Just look at the green stuff!

If you were to print this with a raft, it would take 4 hours and 36 minutes!

So here's where you can play with the print in Flashprint to position the model manually so that you have minimum rafts.

Rotate the model 90 degrees so that most of the detail is vertical and the overhangs are minimal. In the original model the body of the cart is a huge overhang. So we make it vertical so that there is less of a surface area facing down.

After rotating it as close as you can (I can only get like 89.98 for some reason) you can go to Edit -> Auto Layout All and it will re-centre the cart on the build plane.

Now adding supports you can see significantly less supports:

The time even with a raft is now reduced to 3 hours and 32 minutes. Yes. it's a long time for a cart, but we saved an hour and material by just making a rotation!

When printed, the cart worked out well. There was a suspicious inconsistency in one of the arms of the cart which made it kind of weak and easily snapped off.

I thought maybe this was caused by my extruder pulling on the filament since I'm not using the built in holder for the Flashforge Finder and an external one that has to be pulled by the machine. So I printed 2 more and found similar issues but in different locations.

Time for some custom modifications!
I go to Tinkercad.com where you can import and modify models.
Maybe I'll go into detail how I did it but basically I widened the cart to make sure it fit the crate model by importing the crate and important a 2nd cart. I split the two carts in half and merged them back together. Then I added a hexagon shaped pole to the front to make it stronger and printed it.