You will need to define an element table to plot the unaveraged stresses. Sure, color contours look cool, but there are often better ways of presenting data. You must define a path by picking nodes on your model that define your desired path. You will probably need to try this a few times to make certain that you have the correct information. Often, a general merge is needed.
Quadratic bricks are often the best elements for a given problem.
Meshing is one of the most difficult parts of doing an FEM analysis. When I get around to it, I'll write some of the guidelines I use. But what if you want all the nodes between with an x location from 0.05 to 0.06 and a y location between 0.7 and 0.71. Just stack the node selections. Essentially, you select the nodes with y between 0.70 and 0.71 from the set of nodes with an x location between 0.05 and 0.06.