I don't know about the newer stuff but some of the older predator shafts were crap. I don't know if it was from the wood drying or what but we had a few cases where within 6 months the shaft sort of shrunk to a diameter smaller than the ferrule. Two were sent in to predator and both times predator said, "The person who put your tip on the shaft must have done that."
Well two of the shafts belonged to the woman who worked at the pool hall and installed tips every day! She never used sandpaper on her shafts and used a Willard machine for installing tips. This never happened to any other maker's shafts either. Something was clearly wrong with predator shafts and instead of standing behind their product, they chose to blame the customers for their manufacturing defects. The pool hall stopped selling predator shafts to protect their customers from the bad products they were receiving.
It may have been a couple bad batches of shafts over a couple years time or the half dozen junk shafts were a fluke, hard to say. The main point is how poorly predator treated their customers.
