tyro, you bring up a good point in that I actually have demonstration shafts here in the design studio that I show students when they come through here. These shafts are terrible and oscillate in many different directions meaning they have a wicked spine and are basically not playable. All of these shafts are either poor quality OEM shafts or very cheap poor quality shafts that were mostly put in very cheap golf clubs. Notice that I said, “Very cheap shafts of poor quality”, because there are some very good shafts on the market that are very inexpensive, so this is why you cannot simply use price alone. I do not find poor quality anymore in top grade shafts as I have said in previous posts. Part of my lecture in the studio is telling the students that the easiest way to detect a shaft like this is exactly as you described and that is that when any shaft is inconsistent by hitting in all directions meaning hitting it left, right, low and high at random then you may have a shaft problem. As far as I am concerned the solution here is to throw the shaft away and install a high quality shaft if you want to save the driver. When a shaft is this bad, you do not want to try and save it by orientating it in some manner to make it work.
So, while every top quality shaft will always have some sort of a spine you can find, none of our testing has shown any difference in performance by orientating it with the spine in some certain direction. Remember now that we are talking about top grade shafts here with the point being not to play with shafts of very poor quality
