My friend and graphics designer, Tony Burlinson and I have been meaning to dive into the world of 3D printing for years. This year (2024), the opportunity presented itself, for me to take that dive and Tony was keen to join in. Little did I know that it would be the start of my Creality nightmare!
During 2024, I’d taken on a lot of design projects. Amongst them, was AMEP, my advanced memory expansion pack for the Simmons SDS7. It was a mega-cool product and I wanted to do it justice with some cool packaging. Indeed, AMEP was my fist product to have its own box.
To keep AMEP secure, I knocked up a design for a piece of foam but I was shocked when I received quotes from various manufacturers. At 5.88 GBP per piece in batches of 120, I figured I could print these from plastic, myself! So that was the ‘opportunity’ to dive into 3D printing.
After some research, I bought a Creality K1. The price was very reasonable and Tony and I thought that it would be a good starting point for our us newbies, with potential to grow to perhaps a semi-professional level.
Tony already had a lot of experience with 3D CAD but had never made anything physical. With Tony’s artistic flare and my engineering background, a dynamic team was born. We only had six attempts at the AMEP insert before we got it spot on. Not bad for our first 3D print.
You get a ‘free’ 200g spool of white hyper-PGA with the K1 but once that was used up with practice / protype prints, it was time to change to a 1kg spool of black hyper-PGA.
So here was the first pain; feeding the new filament through both feeders (rear and pre hot-end) wasn’t easy. A couple of YouTube videos later, we found a solution which involved taking a lot of stuff apart. Neither Tony or I were keen to do that so we persevered and in the end, we got the bugger through.
The second issue involved the filament clamp on the hot-end. In the ‘locked’ position, it didn’t seem well, locked. Our next print failed because in fact, the filament lock wasn’t indeed locked. It took a while to sort this out but we weren’t at all 100% sure about our efforts to correct this issue.
Eventually, we managed to print a couple of AMEP inserts in black PLA.
Nine prints in, that includes the five prototypes, things went wrong, like BIG time. I’d already had a bad experience leaving the printer unattended. After having bought Creality’s own filament, I was shocked one afternoon, when the print kind of ended up jamming and not completing a print, only to discover that the filament spool had snagged… on itself.
Number 9 however, was the big disaster, my Creality nightmare! It was 2:00 in the morning. I thought that I'd ironed out all the issues and that perhaps things might now be okay (for a pile of shit, that is). I figured I’d print one more insert, go home for an hour, come back and another AMEP would be good to go. When I came back to the lab, I expected to find a perfectly printed AMEP insert. Instead, the K1’s plate was empty. At first, I thought it was another filament snagging problem but as I walked up to the printer, I could see the massive, alien looking, collection of hardened plastic, around the entire hot-end assembly.
So it was 3:30 in the morning and I shot an email over to Creality. Well, they wanted to know everything, like serial number, proof of purchase, what my favourite colour was, blah, blah, blah. Once I’d passed their security (?) they apologised for the inconvenience and proceeded to ask for pictures, which I’d already sent them, incidentally. They then sent me instructions on how to repair my printer! Now my Creality nightmare was really beginning.
“Hang on a minute. I’ve only just bought this. It’s done nine (well, seven actually) prints. It’s not even three weeks old and I was on holiday for a week of that.”
Here's the contents of one of the emails I received from Creality:
Dear customer,
The hotend kit is currently overflowing. So currently you can't get into the filament when you replace the new hotend kit. Please follow the steps below to see if there are other problems besides the hotend kit.
The hotend kit is overflowing, and it can be solved by replacing the hotend kit. You can follow this tutorial to disassemble and clean it, and then see if there are other parts damaged besides the hotend kit, and you can take photos together.
If you can't heat it, do you have a hair dryer or a heat gun at home? You can use these two to heat and clean the filament.
This is the tutorial for disassembling the hotend kit: https://youtu.be/AjLOnpua-cc
At this stage, I need to make the point that after several email exchanges, with me talking about wanting a replacement printer and Creaility not reading any of that and simply telling me how to repair the printer, I kind of gave up. Or did I?
I needed to get these AMEP inserts done. I was desperate for my customers so I bought another printer, the massive CR-30 3D print mill. Creality didn’t have this in stock but I did find one at the uk-creality-official-store on ebay. That’s ‘UK’ in the ebay name by the way and yet the goods were located in California. Hmm…
I also bought something called a CR-30 extended bracket which is like a roller thing, specifically for that printer.
My Creality nightmare continued as the next day, I received an email from the seller informing me that in the last CR-30 extended bracket they had, items were found to be missing so would I accept a credit.
“No problem” I replied. “Please just put it on back-order.”
The reply to my request said something like they had no idea when they would have stock. A refund seemed the only option.
I then ended up buying a CR-30 extended bracket directly from Creality’s website. The deal cost me an additional 17 GBP as I’d lost the benefit of the Black Friday deal on ebay. Grr…
A couple of days later, the CR-30 turned up but by then I’d decided to try to wake myself up from my Creality nightmare. The rare customer service email responses I received, blatantly reflected Creality’s inability or unwillingness to read the important bits in my emails. Bits like “I want a replacement printer”, etc. I’d decided that ‘resistance is futile’ so here I am, summarising my Creality nightmare for all to read and advising that no one considers buying one of this company’s products… EVER!!!! Hey, Creality is NOT going to honour anything, right? Remember that line, ‘cos in my experience, it’s true.
With no confidence that anything would be done about this, I then boxed up the K1 in readiness to take it down the dump. Creality UK or whatever, can eat shit, for all I care.
Regrettably and very disappointingly, PayPal was unable to assist with my purchases from the Creality website. I then went to return the CR-30. The relevant ebay page displayed the notice ‘This seller does not accept returns for this item’. Well, why should I be surprised? After a little digging, I sought some comfort in the fact that the sale was backed by ebay’s money back guarantee.
After a stinking ebay message and a ton of negative feedback, I did get a response from the seller and an offer was made to send me a returns label.
Not there yet... Of course the returns label had insufficient funds on it so when I took it to the post office, the package was rejected as it was considerably more than the 2kg specified on the returns label. Oh what a surprise! At this stage, I tried to contact ebay for help. Hmm... That's not as easy as it used to be so I messaged Creality offering one more opportunity to sort this all out.
I eventually received a valid return label and took the unopened CR-30 to the post depot.
Yeah, I know lesson or lessons learnt and all that.
“What about that CR-30 extended bracket thing?” I hear you ask. Remember, I bought that directly from what I thought was the Creality store and not ebay. Well, several days later I received a return label to a UK address which was the same as the return address for the CR-30 that I'd bought off ebay. On this occasion however, I had to pay for the return carriage myself. Yes, that's right. It cost me 15.86 GBP to return an item that cost me 119 GBP.
There’s something else to note. I’ve mentioned uk-creality-official-store. There’s also crealityofficial.co.uk. I bought the CR-30 extended bracket from store.creality.com/uk. Support emails apparently go to store.uk@creality.com but some go to CS@creality.com. The truth is, that you don’t know where the hell you are and who the hell you’re dealing with!
My experience suggested to me that Creality UK (or whatever), operates in a way which ignores retail / trading law and legislation of various territories around the world and which simply prioritises the Creality way over the right way. Globalisation makes it extremely difficult for organisations such as Trading Standards here in the UK, to control how companies operate when selling products to for example, the UK market.
Okay, some may consider my stance as slightly prejudice. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. Indeed, here are a couple of examples of far eastern brands which I think are just awesome:
I’m a qualified and fully insured drone pilot and my drone arsenal predominantly comprises DJI drones and we all know where they come from. Both Tony and I use Huion pen monitors which are just awesome. Another example, one perhaps more people can relate to, is that of computers. You can’t buy a computer without the insides being made in the far east! So NO, I’m not prejudice.
I would urge good companies from the same country (like China, oops!) to put pressure on companies such as Creality, as the latter is giving the good guys a bad name.
Creality is a company which doesn’t give you all the facts in the first place. Its marketing strongly suggests that it’s based in your country and Creality seems to have its own customer support standard which it prioritises over standards which are taken for granted in other parts of the world where consumer protection exists.
In these situations, one needs to be pragmatic and objective. I can’t help feeling that the consumers’ expectations are unrealistically high, when it comes to this market. The Internet is flooded with videos of 3D printers making all sorts of cool things and manufacturers’ specifications on some devices boast astonishing figures of accuracy and resolution, for example. Truth be known however, real commercial 3D printers cost a lot more than a few hundred quid like, you can easily add a zero on the end of the price tag. On the other hand, the manufacturers themselves are generating the stuff we see online and paying influencers to promote their products doesn’t exactly help.
In fact, I can help imagining that companies like Creality might have teams of people working on online marketing, trimming SEOs on various websites and platforms, offering insane deals to influencers and hammering social media. In contrast, their customer support teams appear to be very thin and working to poor guidelines.
Anyway, Plasma Music fans and friends will be relieved to hear that I persevered with the whole 3D printer thing. Bambu Lab came to the rescue and woke me up from my Creality nightmare. I ordered a X1 Carbon and yeah, it cost a lot more than the Creality K1 but both the printer and the company have a very different feel about them. It’s called ‘professional’, Mr. Creality. 😊
Okay, so this page is loaded with tags and the SEO has been optimised which means that there's a reasonable chance of potential or existing Creality customers stumbling across it. I feel obliged therefore, to make it clear that this post is based on my experience and I simply felt obliged to tell people about just that; my Creality nightmare. There will be those who will disagree with me. There will be those who perhaps feel that Creality is the best 3D printer brand out there. On the other hand, if I'd come across a page like this, while checking out Creailty and the K1, I might not have wasted a lot of time and money!
I'm sorry but having a deal with a shipping company and a warehouse doesn't make you 'UK' or whatever. You need local service and respect either the consumer law of the territory that you wish to operate in or 'distance selling' law.
UPDATE - 23rd December 2024
A couple of days before Christmas 2024. I have confirmed that I have received all the spare parts that Creality has sent me but they are refusing to acknowledge the image that I sent them showing the completely destroyed head assembly and seem puzzled why I'm not able to repair the printer. Here's the latest email from Creality:
Dear customer,
So you have received all the accessories, right?
Are you not sure which accessories to replace? You can let us know and we will try our best to guide you.
Not sure which bit of "Can you please just arrange to have the printer returned for a refund" they don't understand.