Vase Mode Door Stop

This is a complex door stop designed to be printed in vase mode
unlike other complex vase models it has no “open edge” making it much stronger
Producing a remarkably strong door stop to show off techniques for producing practical vase mode prints.

I have been a long time fan of vase mode but i have no interest in vases…
It has many positive qualities but because of its limitations people don't use it for practical parts.
When sliced in prusa slicer only the outer surface is printed, which leads to thin wobbly vases.
But there are many techniques that allow you to trick the slicer into printing complex parts with inner surfaces and printing multi extrusion thick walls.

Print instructions
Vase mode
no top or bottom layers
extrusion width 0.6
layer height 0.1 (optional)

Print time for me is around 3 hours, im sure faster is possible but i don't rush prints.
printing on standard settings quotes me 7:30hr, the solid object would be 5:30hr
so i call that a win.

Some of the tricks
double thickness
imagine slicing a pipe vertically as a vase, it will produce a wobbly cylinder vase,
as it only prints the outer surface. If you then make a very thin cut down one side of the pipe the sicer will think the inside surface is part of the outside surface and print that as well, but the two sides of the cut will not fuse together as outer edges can't touch.
if you then make the pipes wall thickness thinner so that it is just at / under 2x the extrusion width then when it prints the inside and outside wall extrusions will actually touch and fuse together making a double wall.

perforated surfaces
taking the double thick pipe we made above, the cut makes it a C shape and inherently weakens it, but the slicer only sees the object in horizontal layers, so the pipe must be cut for the trick to work, but it doesn't have to be cut in the same place each layer.
In this model the cut locations alternate every 1mm to show of the technique and make a design feature of it, but it is possible to do very small cuts per layer such as they aren't even visible.
they can actually show less than layer change marks because there is no retractions.
when the next layer comes to print over the cut you've made in the previous layer it will simply print over it, bridging the tiny gap and fusing it together.

There are many more techniques, once you understand the rules of vase mode you can start to think of ways around them.
imagine if Prusa gave us the option of turning them off…

Joint My Campaign !
Getting this print to slice correctly was a nightmare, the basic door stop shape took minutes but getting the vase mode cuts to work perfectly took hours.
Surfaces being a fraction of a mm out causes the slicer to not print parts of the model leaving missing layers. Its like writing instructions to try to get the slicer to interpret the model the way you want it.

Many of the tricks I've used should really be built into the slicer.
Rather than vase mode being a simple checkbox to turn on and off.
We could have an an advanced menu in Prusa slicer that allows you to enable some of these tricks, opening up a world of possibilities.

Leave a comment if you want Prusa to pursue this, hopefully they will notice.