Hey Ralph, How about the case where the forearm square, dowel, or tapered cone is highly figured and beautiful in all respects except it is very thuddy in tone? IMO, thuddy tone is an indicator of realtive wood weakness, deadness, or poor integrity. Great shafts cannot compensate for this IMO. This is a situation where I believe coring would be of great help--assuming the core wood is good. This is not to say that a thuddy forearm or thuddy shafted cue won't pocket balls. BTW, you can let a thuddy piece of wood "season" for decades and its not going to get appreciably better. Assuming the wood is dry enough to begin with, allowing wood to acclimate to a particular environment for several months makes total sense. IMO (always have to add this around here

), there is little or nothing to be gained beyond that in terms of working the wood except, perhaps, for the superstitious.
Martin