On 26 February 2026, I purchased a 1kg spool of Creality Grey Hyper PLA for my Sparkx. Last night, while unattended, the CGS Lite stopped feeding due to a buffer error. The issue was (tangled) crossed over filament on the cardboard spool. The mis-spooling apparently began at the beginning of the spool and appeared to be a manufacturing error. I don’t have the ability to un-spool and rewind a defective spool, so the filament ended up in the garbage.
Customer Service offered multiple reasons why this was my fault, citing tension issues caused by the CFS Lite, etc. They requested photos of the discarded filament to escalate my complaint. Since the filament is in the garbage, this is not possible.
I’ve printed more than 20kg of filament on the Sparkx and this is the first time I have encountered tangled filament. My question is: Is Creality correct that I caused the crossed over filament or is it likely just an excuse to avoid replacing the spool? My only recourse seems to be to leave a bad review for their cardboard spools, change vendors or avoid cardboard spools.
this is a tricky one, it could indeed be during production, although that is pretty rare - if you see how filament gets winded in the machines it’s very difficult for it to actually cross, which is what causes the tangle, that being said it’s not completely impossible, however it is indeed most likely that by accident when handling the spool that sometimes you let it slip, and even though it doesn’t seem like it it actually then gets beneath a loop and down the line it eventually get’s snagged (it has happened to me)
all in all it’s difficult to understand exactly, but indeed in most cases it is more on the filament handling side, but it’s not impossible that it was during production
this is funny becasue I just had a roll of hyper gray that did the same thing but on my K2. Of course it was a large print and multi color. lost count after 15 buffer errors. had to sit there and baby it through every color change. If I knew it was going to be that huge of an issues i should have just cut it and got a new roll. anyway I thought it was the filament becasue I opened it just for the project but never thought of contacting creality becasue of the issue. Think it almost impossible to prove that it was becasue of the OEM or the user. well I hope creality helps you, let me know how you make out. best of luck