Carbonex 15
Model CAB-15
Price history
No verified sales on record yet, so we don't publish a market value for the Carbonex 15. Asking prices don't count — only completed sales do. A price chart appears once 3 clean verified sales are logged.
0 verified transactions on record · USD · methodology
Saw a sale? Report it →Where to find it
Search live eBay listings →Places to search for this racquet. We don't track stock, and listings and asking prices change fast, so check at the source.
Carbonex 15: the 1982 all-carbon Yonex set beside Liem Swie King’s jumping smash
All carbon by 1982
On Yonex’s racquet-history display, the Carbonex 15 is the first model described as all carbon in frame and shaft. The display, shown at Istora Senayan in Jakarta during the 2008 Thomas and Uber Cup finals and known from bloggers’ transcriptions and photographs rather than from a Yonex page, dates it to 1982, between the aluminum-framed Carbonex 8 of 1978 and the Carbonex 20 of 1984, and sets it beside “Liem Swie King’s jumping smashes.” The first Yonex document that prints its specifications comes much later: Yonex’s 1996 Asian catalog, dated by the collector who scanned it, lists it as a high-modulus graphite racquet for advanced players. Nothing between those two points is documented, and the plain name does not appear in any later Yonex list on record.
High-modulus graphite and a built-in joint
The display’s caption gives only “all carbon frame & shaft,” the step after the Carbonex 8, whose aluminum alloy frame sat on a full-carbon shaft. Yonex’s Japanese corporate chronology for the 1980s names no badminton racquet at all; its 1982 entry under the Carbonex name is a golf club combining carbon graphite and persimmon. The 1996 catalog fills in a specification: a Built-In T-Joint, a high-modulus graphite frame and shaft, the Advanced player level, the Hard Hitter label, and ratings of 4 for flex, 4 for power and 4 for control on the catalog’s own scale. It prints no weight, balance, flex word, price or country of manufacture. Whether the frame of 1982 already had the built-in joint, which the display first credits to the Carbonex 20, is not documented.
Liem Swie King’s smash, not his racquet
No player is documented using the Carbonex 15. Yonex’s display ties it to “Liem Swie King’s jumping smashes,” the trademark of the Indonesian who won the All England singles in 1978, 1979 and 1981, but it does not say he played the racquet. The English Wikipedia article on King states that he is known to have used the Carbonex 15 and cites no source. A Yonex print ad captioned with his 1978 and 1979 All England titles puts King beside a different model, closing with “a word of advice from Liem Swie King: Carbonex 8 by Yonex.” Both are marketing links rather than match records, and no Yonex source documents which racquet King played in a given match.
One catalog photo and a Long successor
Yonex documents no colorways or editions of the Carbonex 15. The 1996 catalog photo shows a dark frame and shaft with the name in gold script along the shaft, a gold-colored throat piece and a black full-length cover lettered “Carbonex 15.” Beside it, the Carbonex 10, also for advanced players, has a plain graphite frame on a high-modulus shaft and lower ratings. By Yonex’s spec chart dated to 1999 and its 2000 Asian catalog, the Carbonex lists carry a Carbonex 15 Long instead: Built-In T-Joint, box frame, Stiff, high-modulus graphite frame and shaft, 2U (90–94 g), with “Carbonex 15 Long” on the shaft. Yonex never says how the two relate; the 15 Long has its own page. On other Carbonex models the Long label marks a separate model sold under its own name (Yonex Japan listed the Carbonex 20 and 20 Long side by side in 2001), so the 15 Long’s specifications are not the Carbonex 15’s.
A name without a price
No Yonex price for the Carbonex 15 is documented, in yen or any other currency, and no Yonex Japan page for it is known. Resale listings, including Japanese ones, use the English name. Because the Carbonex 15 Long of 1999–2000 carries almost the same name, a listing titled only “Carbonex 15” needs a clear photo of the shaft print before it can be placed. Nothing published separates a frame of the 1980s from one of the mid-1990s. No verified sales are recorded yet.
Namesakes, not fakes
No counterfeit of the Carbonex 15 is documented. The likelier errors are of identity. The Carbonex 15 Long is the closest namesake: a later model with the Long suffix in its print; it has its own page. The Carbonex 10 of the same 1996 spread is a lower-rated sibling with a plain graphite frame; it has its own page. The name Carbonex itself is older than the badminton frame and wider than it: Yonex’s history applies it to soft-tennis and tennis racquets of the 1970s and to a golf club launched in 1982, the only Carbonex in Yonex’s own chronology for that year.
The step between the 8 and the 20
The Carbonex 15’s place in Yonex’s history rests on one display caption: the all-carbon step between the Carbonex 8, which the display pairs with Flemming Delfs, and the Carbonex 20, whose name stayed on Yonex Japan’s price list into 2024 (see CAB-8 and CAB-20). Its later record is a single catalog spread of 1996 and a Long successor name. For collectors it is a link in the Carbonex lineage whose 1982 date comes from Yonex itself, but whose early frames Yonex never described in print.
Yonex’s only specification for the Carbonex 15 is its 1996 Asian catalog: a high-modulus graphite frame and shaft with a built-in T-joint, for advanced players, rated 4 for flex, power and control on the catalog’s own scale. It gives no weight, balance, flex word or country of manufacture. The catalog photo shows a dark frame and shaft, the name in gold script along the shaft and a gold-colored throat piece. Read the whole shaft print: “Carbonex 15 Long” is the later model, which Yonex’s 2000 catalog rates Stiff and 2U. A weight class or factory mark printed on a frame describes that frame only. On a frame several decades old, check the throat, the grommets and the hoop for cracks.
The Carbonex 15 suits Carbonex completists and collectors of Yonex’s pre-Isometric history. Its 1982 date and its link to Liem Swie King come from a display caption, so a seller’s claim that a frame is a 1982 original, or that King played it, needs evidence beyond the name. Confirm that the shaft print reads Carbonex 15 without “Long,” and treat any stated year as unproven unless the frame or its paperwork shows it.