i cant seem to get the normals on this object to work uve tried recalculating and flipping the normals on the individual faces etc and removing extra verts still no luck
If recalculate normals doesn’t give you continuous normals, the odds are pretty good that you have some problems with the geometry you made. One of the rules of “manifold geometry” is that each edge connects two and only two faces. If you have an edge that connects three faces, it’s never going to be able to give you consistent normals.
So inspect your mesh and look for problems. One tool that is useful for troubleshooting these kind of mesh problems is the “select non manifold” operation. You might consider playing with that.