Your whole argument that the manufacturer of raw materials is more likely to make higher quality applications/products of those raw materials is actually spurious!
The equivalent for steel shafts - or even club head manufacturers - is that manufacturers of steel would make the best steel shafts - clearly not the case! And that - by extension - in order to make the best quality shafts (or heads!) a company would have to be a manufacturer of the raw materials! That's simply totally wrong!
Oh! And True Temper own Project X - who DO make both steel and graphite shafts - though they don't make the steel, nor the graphite/epoxy! They also own Grafalloy btw!
We buy the vast majority of our materials from a company called Toray. They provide all the carbon fiber to Boeing for their aircraft. A long time ago we did make our own prepreg but we decided to stop doing that and purchase from Prepreg companies for a couple reasons. First, the companies we work with are the best fiber and prepregers in the world. Second, a batch of prepreg cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you (Or your parent company) makes a bad batch, you are going to use that batch rather than scrap it out and take the loss. For us, if we were to receive a bad batch of material can send it back.
Last thing, there are only a few very high end fiber manufacturers in world, so most of the shaft companies you know and love (or hate) are all using the same fibers. It's every bit, if not more, about how the engineers use those materials as it is the raw materials themselves.
It's a disgrace isn't it.
£430 for ONE GOLF CLUB!!! and then you find it's main component is a cheap knock-off.
The world we live in makes me a little sad sometimes.
