I have a beautiful custom-made rod on a Sage Z-axis blank, 5 weight, 4 piece. I was roll-casting with it, perhaps 25 to 30 feet of line off the reel, 5 weight floating weight forward line, a size 10 or 12 light weight floating fly on the tippet. As I roll-cast forward, the distal (the smallest) piece of the rod snapped completely in two, about 2 inches above the ferrule.
The rod maker has a "You break it, I repair it" policy, and when I phoned him to tell him about it, he said he was convinced a lot of breakage of light weight rods was due to rough handling of the package containing the rod during shipping, i.e., the rod would be cracked or etc. during shipping and then the strain on the rod during fishing would complete the job.
Which got me to wondering (always weird, sometimes dangerous). In order to make the rod as light as possible, the rods are made with thinner walls, and if it is a fast rod, then would that make the rod more "brittle"? So would a fast light rod (like the Sage Z-axis or Orvis Helios tip flex, etc.) be more apt to snap than a heavier medium or medium flex rod? Or am I a million miles off the mark? What do you engineers out there think? Just wondering.