shaft questions

I bought a new driver last year and it has a Aldila RIP 60 tour s flex shaft on it. my question is do shafts lose form after being hit the snot out of for a year?  How often should shafts be replaced on woods? what shafts are the best money can buy and why? Usually my driver stays with me for 5 years or so but I like to keep my equipment in shape. thanks in advance for the input

If the shaft is giving you issues, get fit.

There are so many shafts out there, Fuji, Matrix, Mitsubishi, UST-Mamiya, etc, etc, that you've got to go to a custom club maker, jump on his LM with the ball that you use in play, and get a fitting.

The only thing i have seen with shafts is the tip breaking, i never seen them warp or bend out of shape.

A graphite shaft will not last forever. You just gave two examples of why not. I'd assume the effects of slight cracking and peeling layers would be noticable during a swing long before they were visible to the naked eye. Just thinking out loud here.

What's most likely (imho) is that as a person's swing changes over time, a shaft that's on either end of the good fit spectrum will sometimes work and sometimes be a dud. The OP might get fit and find his shaft was never quite right and that he just made it work at first the way we all do subconsciously with a new stick..

I have bought over ten drivers in the past two years. I've experienced two breakages.  One from my 15 yr old Grandson mishandling the driver and subsequently snapping the shaft at the hosel.

The second was also snapped at the hosel by my Son-in-law. I think he just hits too hard because he also busted the face of a different driver.  Anyway during the period of the failures both had trouble with their swing and had hit the ground behind the ball on occasion.

My experience tells me that with normal handling a graphite shaft will last a very long time unless subjected to a stress that is confined to a small area of it's length.  I live on the Gulf and own over 15 fishing rod sets. The graphite ones are great but will fail if stressed by allowing the rod to touch the boat railing while under the stress of a strong fish.  The concentration of a flex in the small area of contact with the rail is outside the range of what the rod is designed to handle and it snaps. I'm not an engineer but I think the same thing happens to a shaft if the head hits something that doesn't move during a full swing.   But of course if delaminated or cracked at any point they are weakened and bound to fail eventually.

A shaft that feels wrong probably is wrong. It might be flawed (damaged, manufacturer's defect, whatever) or simply a poor fit, but why fight it? Replace it.