I'm not going to defend anybody here, but there are some things you should understand about cue making. We begin with raw materials, and with any raw material we only know what we can see. Once we begin working with it, successive cuts or simply time itself will reveal flaws that we were unaware of, rendering the material junk. Nobody buys 100 shafts expecting to build 100 cues. You buy 100 shafts hoping to build 70, realistically expecting to build 50. It's the nature of the beast and is a fact that EVERY cue maker using solid wood shafts has to contend with. Even production companies deal with it. We don't blame the supplier because wood went bad. Nature does what nature does regardless of what we want. We do, however, blame the supplier if the wood was already known to be bad before it was sold to us. That's where your situation is iffy. Did your supplier know it before sending it to you?
As for the grain pattern you're speaking of, if it's the minor waves you show in your pic, then I'd say it's pretty normal. The pic shows 7-8" of 30" blanks, and it's the joint end shown. I don't see any issues in the section you show, and cannot comment on what I can't see. IMO, if you start at the joint end and pick a grain line in the middle, visually follow it to the tip, if it didn't run off the side of the shaft then it's a great shaft. If you start at the tip end and follow it to the joint without it running off, it's a good shaft. A few waves or wrinkles, especially at the joint end, are trivial. Furthermore, the more grain lines a shaft has, the more exaggerated those waves & wrinkles look because you have more dark lines to outline the imperfection.
I'm not taking any sides. I'm only playing devil's advocate for the purpose of conversation. The stuff I mention is from my own perspective and I am neither supplier nor consumer, but manufacturer. The fact that you bought only 3 shafts & ordered them at finish size indicates that you are a consumer, not a manufacturer. My guess is that either you have limited ability/experience to tinker or else you had a mind to hire a cue maker to do the work on the shafts. Either way, you feel like you got robbed, but it's nothing more than an every day experience for every cue maker buying raw material. The only mistake you made was grossly over paying for a supplier to do the work a cue maker should have been doing, and expecting something that we builders know is unrealistic. Like I said, I'm not taking any sides, just pointing out a different perspective.
