My first experience was more than a year ago when my curiousity motivated me to buy a blank from one of the chinese suppliers. It was just an experiment and my first try to build a cf shaft for myself. After it was finished I've tested it at the table and I did not like it at all. I'm not sure if it was my failure either with the way to fill the tube or other details when it comes to construction ... or the quality of the tube (the way it was made). What I do know for sure I did not like its taper and its quality was worse than those known shafts I've tested - Revo, Cynergy.
I guess one day I'll just put a harder tip on it good enough for breaking and it may become an ok breaking shaft for an affordable breaker if someone will be looking for.
Last spring I've made my second try ordering two more tubes from another supplier who was actually a cue-builder who as he said he had participated in the process of producing the tubes giving the information when it comes to the taper, wall thickness etc. and the tubes were produced at South Korea.
When I got those tubes the first impression was much better than with the previous. The taper was great, the finish, the look were also way better. The only flaw I've noticed once it was at the lathe spinning - they were not perfectly straight but the wobble was really small.
I've used my first experience and filled these tubes differently together with some other details and at the end these shafts turned out to be much better comparing to the first one like night and day...but honestly one of the reasons being that first one was no good at all).
One of these new tubes was for my friend who also builds cues and was interested to try and another one again I planned to build for myself.
Actually once I finished it and tested at the table I liked it first and continued to play with it till my new playing cue with a solid hard maple LD shaft was finished in a month or so.
Once I've tested my new cue with this maple shaft I understood I'll have hard time to build a shaft which performs, feels and so on for me better.
So at the end my friend already sold his shaft for a guy who is pretty happy about it.
I have a pupil who tried my cf shaft and liked it a lot so I've just finished a butt to suit it and hopefully I'll have one more pupil with a new playing tool he is happy with.
P.S. So as I'm more or less a hobby builder who is motivated by my own reasons ... my curiosity is satisfied when it comes to cf shafts and in spite of all the time and so on needed to work with wood to build quality shafts I like it more due to more space for creativity, knowledge, skills, experience and so on gained after working with wood.
Well when it comes to cf shafts so as I don't have any interest, possibilities so on to produce my own cf blanks I don't find it very interesting, creative to produce cf shafts using those tubes available.
I see all those benefits cf offers to make the finished product and of course if someone asks me to get a certain (tip diameter, taper so on) tube and make a shaft for him I can do that with no problem but at the time I have no interest to replace my wooden shafts by cf ones.
As I said I had much better experience building great playing shafts using wood ... definitely I did not build as much cf shafts yet comparing to wooden though ... so who knows what is waiting in the future).
Good luck with your future experience.
