Thanks Brocky, cant hurt to give it a try. Been trying to watch the formation closely. I start to notice it as soon as I bury the core inside the cover. It gets worse from there. I am not clear how the crossover could be causing this. I do seat the crossover pretty tightly, follow up with a few stitches, then massage it until its uniform and round.
In this pic, I have not trimmed the core excess off so its not the result of cutting the core short or the taper getting sucked back into the eye.
It does look like the N.e Tree might be correct as you can see the cover strands where the core exits the cover are right where the kink forms.
Looking at some online print splicing instructions, I do see the same kink in the illustrations so this could be normal/unavoidable. I may order a few pro spliced large eye split tails to see for myself (or maybe one of the experience splicers on here could try a larger eye to see if they get the same kink). The eyes I am trying to make take 16-20" of rope