Summary

After buying many different pet food bowls, I just couldn't find one that wasn't too shallow, too deep, too narrow, too wide, or any combination of this. This resulted in my cat taking the dry food and throwing it outside the bowl in order to eat it. One thing that she frequently did is hit her teeth on the edges of the bowl and that annoyed her, and sometimes low bowls can also cause issues with swallowing food.

This sounds a bit more dramatic than it actually was, she still ate normally, it's just that those few times when there were issues I wanted to come up with a better solution.

In the quest to find the perfect bowl, I've also read a lot about things like whisker stress, ideal heights for bowls, and so on. After many iterations, my trusty Quality Assurance Engineer (my cat Lara) and me found something that works for her, so I'm sharing the files - but this is not a universal solution. However, it's definitely an improvement over 90% of stuff on the market.

All files are print in place.

Food & Safety

First things first, cats should eat wet food if possible. Dry food isn't great for them. But as anyone who has cats can confirm, cats don't always want that what is best for them, so the bowl is designed with primarily dry food in mind, but there's no issue with it being used for wet food as well.

The bowl raiser fits any bowl with <154mm diameter. The accompanying bowl/bowl mold is 152mm in diameter.

Bowl is optional, but if you decide to print it:

IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the bowl as-is after printing to serve food, bacteria can accumulate in between layer lines and will be impossible to thoroughly clean.

Instead, for food safety, do one of the following:

• Print the bowl in any material you want, but before serving food on it use food safe epoxy to coat it. I've done this and it works great.
• Use food safe silicone, epoxy, or some other food safe material and use the mold to make the bowl out of that material. Hint: If you coat the mold itself with something like epoxy beforehand, you will have smooth surfaces.

Files

There are 3mf files which can be printed as is. Given the geometry, you can also easily use the scale feature of the slicer to change the dimensions where needed. But the STEP files are still included if you want to make some further adjustments.

Bowl

There are two versions, one that can be printed as-is and used (don't forget to cat in food safe material beforehand!), or you can use the mold to make it out of a different material. Personally, I've used food safe silicone to make the bowl, this is great as the surface is not slippery, the material isn't hard even when my cat hits it with her teeth, and it just works better for her.

Raiser

The raiser comes in different versions, 5 degree, 10 degree, and 15 degree as well as in 3 different sizes, default 100mm, 125mm, and 150mm - if you're not sure which one to use try guesstimating or cutting it in half vertically and then printing few mm of the cross section to get a better idea.

Besides the height the only difference is the angle at which the bowl is being held, other parameters are the same. I find that 5 or 10 degrees works best, but if you want to use it with some other bowl then maybe 15 degrees would work even better, so I've included it. In the photos I'm using 5 degree 100mm (default) one, and a bowl made out of silicone.

The weight of the raiser can be varied by either increasing infil, or pausing at some layer height and putting some material inside that will make it heavier. I'd recommend printing it with some default settings and seeing how it goes. I've used PLA with 2 wall layers, and 15% infill and haven't had issues with it falling over or similar.