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To me it looks like you're having some issues with under extrusion. The gaps persists in the top layer of the thicker part further down as well, indicating that the printer isn't able to output enough plastic to make a solid gap-free layer. I would suggest lowering the printspeed or raising the nozzle temp, or a combination of both depending on how severe it is. Start with smaller increments and work your way from there until you hopefully see some improvements. A slight speed decrease or a few degrees higher nozzle temp can be all it takes in some cases, while in others you might have to tweak them more. It could also be related to issues with walls and infill like d12 states, but I would try tweaking "minimum line width"(lowering it) and enabling "print thin walls" first to see if that is enough to help in case it's part of the problem. Changing the model shouldn't be necessary.

It definitely looks nifty, but I'm not sure I would consider it necessary. I think it's such an easy task to oil the rods directly from the flask, so while it might be useful I don't think I would put any effort into making/buying one of those. I simply wipe the rods down with a cloth to get rid of any dust or other stuff that's not supposed to be there, and then I put a single drop of oil on every rod and just manually move the head around for a while, making sure to go along the edges as well. That usually does it and coats the entire rods with an appropriate amount of oil. I think that's easy enough as it is. I still like the idea though!

Looks like the lines of the text are simply too thin at some areas. If your line width is higher than the thickness of the letters, they won't print properly. If you haven't already, try enabling the "Print Thin Walls" feature and adjust the "Minimum Thin Wall Line Width" to see if you can get an acceptable result. Be aware that it can be hard to get good looking letters when they are that small/thin, because the printer can have a hard time printing consistently when outputting thinner lines. If that doesn't work or you've already tried it I think you might want to switch to the 0.2 nozzle, which will be able to print thinner walls more easily. Edit: I just saw that you have the "Minimum Wall Line Width" set to 0.6. You might want to lower that one quite a bit as well and try again. And while we're at it, if you don't already use it I would recommend getting the "Settings Guide" extension by Ghostkeeper. It's perfect if you want to learn more in-depth facts about what all the different settings do and how they affect your print.

It will not only work for small gaps, it's just easier with small gaps. I'm certain that you can use this method for at least medium sized parts as well if you do some tuning. And on that note there are a lot of other features that the slicer can't guarantee that they can be done other than in specific instances, so I don't see how this feature would be any different in that aspect. Spiralize mode on it's own already requires specific types of models to work well, so I'm sure that another feature like this, that you have to enable manually, won't hurt anyone.

Here's a test print I did with a better quality PETG filament. I had some pretty severe under extrusion because of a partial clog in the nozzle, but despite that it came out just fine apart from the walls, which aren't the focus here anyway. Even the first top layer it printed looks pretty decent from underneath, it connected every single line to both sides and by the time it finished the 4th layer you can't even tell that it's hollow 3 layers down. Just some under extrusion still visible, which has nothing to do with the way the model was printed. With an unclogged nozzle and a decently tuned printer you'll be able to get great results, without a doubt. Definitely not "physically impossible".

I think you can suggest it on this page: Issues · Ultimaker/Cura · GitHub If I remember correctly you can post a new issue there and choose between bug report and feature request, that's probably your best bet.

Of course it will be next to impossible to print a model with a rim like that, since the printer has to print a circle in mid-air. But that's completely irrelevant to his request. He wants to print completely closed off top layers, which means that it would only print straight lines between two points of the circular wall. And that is definitely possible if you have a fine tuned printer. If Cura would have the same settings for top layers as it does for bottom layers, so that you'd be able to define a thickness/number of top layers, you would be able to get an acceptable result on models like bottles with a narrow top. The first layer will most likely look bad, but on the 3rd/4th/5th layer it will look good. Just for fun I modeled a cylinder with 0.4mm wall thickness (1 line) and 0.8mm closed off top (4 top layers @ 0.2 layer thickness), 30mm diameter. I printed it with my UM2+ which is far from well tuned and with a PLA filament that has given me some trouble so far, and it still came out fine. Slow print speed, relatively high fan speed, tuned the temps a bit. Sure, the first top layer looks horrible. But the second one covered the whole surface pretty well, the third layer looked okay-ish and the fourth and final layer looks perfectly fine. Make it 5 layers just to be safe and you'll never notice the bad first layers. Since you won't ever see the first top layers it won't be a problem at all. And even then, the nozzle on my badly tuned printer only connected with the wall on like every 5th-6th turn on the first layer and it still came out fine. If you have a well tuned printer which manages to connect most of the lines there won't be any problems at all. I'll switch to another filament and give it another go to see if I can get even better results, and perhaps post some images later if you don't believe me.

I'd try a thinner layer of glue. It looks like you have quite a lot of glue on the buildplate, and I've noticed that when I put too much of it it won't stick as well. I just run the gluestick in a zig-zag motion over the glass and then take a pretty wet paper cloth or similar and wipe it around until I don't see any solid glue left. Then I try to wipe the paper smoothly over the entire glass so that it leaves an even layer of moisture/gluey water. When that dries it will leave a nice thin layer of glue that works much better for me. I also find that a slightly higher bed temp makes a big difference as well. It's been a while since I printed with ABS, but IIRC I used to put the bed temp at 105c. Just 5-10 degrees lower and the warping became much worse. High bed temp and as low as you can go on fan speed. And like the others recommend, a big brim can work wonders. The experimental setting "Draft Shield" in Cura could also be something worth trying.

What type of printer do you use? As gr5 already stated, some printers have the temperature set in the printer instead of in the slicer. My UM2+ works that way, I can't change any temperature settings in Cura, all of them are managed in the printer with material profiles and in the settings menu while printing.

If it's not flat and there's only one layer that's off it will not show any supports anyway, since there's not enough space for it. To put it into perspective, supports usually leave one "empty" layer between the support and the print, to prevent them from sticking together too much. If you have a one layer gap between the build plate and some areas of the print it won't be putting any supports there because that one layer gap would be left out between the support and the print anyway. It's most definitely not flat, I've downloaded it and checked as well.

From the looks of it it's simply because it's a small model, and the walls do some pretty sharp turns where it's hard for the nozzle to fill in the gaps. My best bet would be to lower line width from 0,4 to 0,35 (I usually go for 0,35 on all my prints) and perhaps lower the minimum wall line width to 0,2-0,25 and give that a go if you're on a version of Cura that has variable line width. The slice looks much better that way, so hopefully it would translate to the finished print as well. If that doesn't do the trick I would just try raising the temp a bit and perhaps play with the flow to see if that helps.

The lines on the sliced part look normal to me, it just looks like gaps but I'm pretty sure that the lines touch each other almost everywhere. They do have gaps at some places, but you can see that it also fills in those gaps with smaller zig-zag lines. If it has gaps when it prints it's likely that it's caused by under extrusion and you should be able to get rid of it by tweaking the printer settings. If it only happens on the first layer you might have to dial in your buildplate to be slightly closer to the nozzle, and if it's throughout the whole print it might be resolved by higher nozzle temp or slower print speed. It's a bit hard sometimes to give a solution just by looking at an image, but if you provide a project file of the printjob it will be easier for someone to give better help.

Try pressing the little "Fx" symbol next to the Wall line count. You should then be able to change the Wall thickness. I think that if you type a numeric value into the Wall line count setting it will override the Wall thickness. As far as I know the Wall line count is a calculation of the Wall thickness and it changes automatically when you change the Wall thickness.

I'm not sure, because I don't have a dual extruder printer and have never looked at the related settings, but to me that looks like a prime tower. Not sure why it would make one if your print is entirely TPU (no supports etc. in PLA) but you could check any settings related to "prime tower" and hopefully that's what it is and you can turn it off!

Laying a part flat on the bed is really easy in Cura as well. Literally 3-4 mouse clicks depending on if you have the part highlighted or not. I've also never had any issues with the vase mode in Cura, it works like a charm and produces strong prints as well. As for supports I almost always design my parts so that I can print them without supports, and when I really need them I model the supports into the part in my CAD software. Makes for the least amount of hassle possible and it turns out exactly like I want it 100% of the time. When I do use the support function in Cura I can't say that I've ever had any real issues with removing them when printing with common filaments like PLA/ABS/PETG, unless there are really small details on the part that breaks off easily.

It looks like the sides of that part all lean towards the middle, and I assume that the text is cut straight in from the surface it's on? As in, the text cutout is tilted slightly toward the middle as well, and the top and bottom layers of the text are not completely parallel to the buildplate? A bit hard to describe what I mean in text, I hope you understand. If that is the case, the upper parts of smaller details in the letters will be isolated areas, or peaks, that are impossible to print without having a seam and retraction at that specific place. If the letters were cut completely straight relative to the buildplate you could get rid of those blobs by specifying where the Z-seam should be (as in anywhere else than on the letters, depending on your preferences). I could have a better look and test it out if you are able to share the model or a package file, it's a bit hard to see on the image exactly how the letters are modelled.

I'm not sure about how the Ender machines work, but on my UM2+ the distance between nozzle and bed during leveling should be 0.1mm if I remember correctly. That distance is then adjusted automatically depending on initial layer height. If I've leveled it to exactly 0.1mm and enter 0.2mm as initial layer height the printer will start at 0.2mm from the bed. So if the Ender machine is supposed to be calibrated to 0.2mm when leveling and you enter 0.16mm initial layer height I believe that it should compensate for it automatically and it shouldn't cause any problems. And come to think of it, if the nozzle were to be too far from the bed and the plastic doesn't stick to the bed properly, the nozzle will probably stretch out the plastic in the air, causing it to become thinner than 0.16mm even if the nozzle was, for example, 0.2mm from the bed. While also likely leaving little blobs here and there. I'm just spitballing here though, to be clear. Speaking of gunk in the nozzle. I've made a routine of always pulling the filament out (similar to the atomic method) every time I switch filament, as well as using different nozzles for different materials. I have one for PLA, one for PETG, one for ABS and one for "others". So if I'm about to switch from PLA to PETG I'll manually heat the nozzle to about 110C and keep a constant pulling force on the filament while the nozzle heats up. When it reaches about 60-70C the plastic usually starts coming out slowly and eventually pops loose with all the filament that was in the nozzle coming out. I make sure not to pull too hard on the filament since it tends to snap off sometimes. Then I switch nozzles to the PETG one, and the PLA one will come out completely clean and empty. This method doesn't even take much longer than unloading the filament through the printer menu. After fitting the new nozzle I just push the new filament in by hand as far as it goes, switch material in the menu (without unloading the material) and use the "move material" feature in the menu to make sure that the filament is loaded completely. And I also wipe the nozzle with a paper cloth between each print that takes a bit more time to finish. I haven't had a single clogged nozzle since I started this routine about 2 years ago and have printed about 3k hours since then. Sorry for the walls of text I throw at you, I just want to give you any tips I know of!

Of course, I'm happy to help as best I can! Very strange. So if I understand correctly it would for example matter how big your print is, in relation to where this problem occurs? Say, if you print a model with a bigger base, will the problem occur at a different place on the bed than with a smaller model? Or similarly, if you were to move the Z-seam to the opposite side of the print so that it starts printing at a different place, will the problem occur at the opposite side as well? What happens if you let the print continue, will it keep printing fine on one side and bad on the other on each new layer, or does it extrude better or worse the longer it prints? I had similar issues once when printing with PETG for the first time. It printed fine the first 5-10 seconds and then extruded less and less filament until it stopped completely at the second or third layer depending on the model size. Turned out that the temp was simply too low, so that the nozzle was clogged almost immediately after cleaning it out between prints. It usually worked if I started a new print without cleaning the nozzle, which had me confused for a while, but I assume that when the nozzle was heating up for a new print it "over-shoots" the temp and went to 4-5C higher than the set temp, which allowed the plastic to flow initially until the temp leveled out. I now print that filament at 5-6C over the max recommended temp on the spool, which feels a bit weird, but at least it works now. I see that you've checked your nozzle temps, but perhaps you're facing a similar scenario where printing at a higher temp than recommended could solve the problem.

The fact that it prints well on one side of the bed but not the other makes me immediately assume that it's an issue with the bed leveling. I'm not sure how you level your bed and how you can be sure that it's perfect, but I've had this exact issue a couple of times and it's been because of bad bed leveling every single time. I'm by no means an expert on 3D-printer software, but I can't imagine that the software would be causing the printer to underextrude on one specific side of the printer while extruding perfectly on another side. I'm not sure, but I've never heard of there being any settings related to extrusion rates that depend on the location of the printhead on the bed, which could potentially be acting up and causing this issue. I'd say make absolutely sure that the bed is level, and that it's actually flat, and try again. I've had a bunch of different problems all caused by bad bed leveling, and it's such a sensitive factor that even the slightest deviation can give big issues depending on filament type and print job.

Some better images or a better description of the problems you are facing would be great. The "as shown" doesn't really tell us that much right now since it's hard to tell from your images what problems you are referring to.

I don't think that the layer height has that much of an impact here. Layer width is likely what you need to fiddle with first. Enabling "Thin Walls" would be a good start, like dsp said. You could also try lowering the "Minimum Wall Line Width" value and see if that makes for a better result, since it will print small details with thinner lines and hopefully fill in some of those gaps. If you're not getting good enough results after testing those things you could give "Ironing" a go. If you enable Ironing and check the "Iron Only Highest Layer" box it will only Iron the text and should give you a smooth top surface.

Looks like there's something wrong with the model. If I download it and open it in Cura it says that the model isn't watertight, and when I slice it the model just looks like a bunch of layers with gaps in between. So you might have to check the model and see if there's something that could be wrong with it or the export process of the file.

I would start off by trying a higher build plate temperature. When I print with ABS I usually have the bed at 95-100°C, and I've noticed that it doesn't take much of a decrease in bed temp before the prints start to come off, at least from my experience. I do however print on glass bed with glue stick, but it might be worth a try in any case.

You could also post-process the cutters with sandpaper if you just want a smooth finish, in case you don't want to buy a new buildplate. A flat surface like that should be easy to make smooth really fast.

You might need to tweak the overhang angle setting. Looks like you've put it at 51 which might simply be too low for it to add support. Not sure why the tree supports show up, I rarely use those. But try increasing the angle value a bit and slice again, they should eventually appear for normal support as well. Edit: Of course I meant lowering the overhang angle setting. I downloaded your model and lowered it from 51 to 40 and it added supports just fine.