In our ongoing efforts to turn lemons into lemonade here at PoolDawg's worldwide headquarters we present the third episode in our ongoing series "What's In The Shaft?".  For those who missed out, the first installment looked at the innards of a Predator 314 shaft and the second checked out the guts of a McDermott G-Core shaft.  This time, we're looking at the OB-1 shaft made by the fine folks at OB Cues.  It doesn't happen too often, but every now and again a package gets damaged en route to a customer.  This is the result:

  What you're seeing here is not the dreaded pink slime, but rather the silicon rubber core that lives inside every OB shaft.  The goal of the rubber core (as I understand it anyway) is to dampen vibration while maintaining the feel of an uncored shaft.  But, as they say, that's not all.  In addition to the rubber core, there's also the mass reduction foam:

As we found out from the busted 314 shaft, the top 5 inches of that shaft is hollow in order to reduce the weight of the top of the shaft which in turn reduces deflection.  Instead of going with the hollow, OB fills that five inch area with what they call a mass reduction foam.  This, along with the wood ferrule definitely lightens the load in the front compared to a normal shaft.