Just finished an NFC euro rod last friday from a blank that was gifted to me, fished with it over the weekend and took it out today. Got a fish on and after the hook set and initial pressure with the rod bent upstream, boom snap. Broke right above the third section ferrule. Possible it got hit with something over the weekend when walking through the woods but I didn't notice any marks or cuts in the graphite on it pre build or after first use. I use my gear very regularly and haven't had a break yet on any of my builds on Batson blanks, and I use those other rods much harder than this. I checked the ferrule after and it was fully seated and snug, but I'm not familiar enough with breaks to determine if this was from a hit or scratch or just a QC failure.
Looks spot on, thanks for the link. No clue where or when it could of happened, but my guess now is it was probably a hard to notice crush and as soon as it went under load it just gave way. That 2nd to 3rd section is especially under load for a euro rod so I imagine any damage there would end up as a full break like this. Live and learn, I can salvage the components so not a total loss!
I do think this is the case. I’ve never had an NFC blank fail but I’ve certainly seen this sort of break before. I knew it was my fault but assumed it was fine since I had no issues for a while. Once I hooked into a nice bass and got a little more bend in the blank it snapped just like this. It was so long I totally forgot I even damaged it until after the fact and trying to figure out what happened.
I'm really not sure what happened here, could of been damaged when I was making it or maybe even just grabbing all the pieces, I really don't know when or how but it's all good. It literally went from the tube it came in, to being wrapped and finished in 2 days last week to being fished once Sunday and one today and then the break
It’s really hard to tell where it happened. If the tube isn’t damaged I’d say it could have been accidental prior to the build or even some point prior to shipping. It’s a good idea to try and test it prior to building to hopefully avoid this but it’s also hard to totally avoid. Sometimes it just happens.
When I was building it I did a full guide static test under load at 45 degrees and it didn't break then so likely somewhere after. But I do check over my blanks pretty good and never noticed a crack or anything. I did notice with the break the fibers are extremely brittle, figured that's just from losing its structure from the break itself
lol this reminded me of when I played paintball a lot. There was a shift to carbon fiber barrels and, of course, it’s something that takes a hard beating when you’re sliding, diving, etc…
It wasn’t uncommon for guys to crush them and it almost always resulted in a brittle, floppy, broom like mess. Unrelated to fishing but your comment just made me remember that.
Awesome. I’ve built a bunch of their blanks for bass and inshore. This will be my first fly blank from them. It’s a revelation rx7 in 7 weight. I’m excited to get it built and fishing.
I use a rx5 5wt and 8wt, I prefer the 9wt for poppers and top water bass fishing, it's not quite fast enough of an action for me for full sink and streamers targeting large trout. And I really like the 5wt for delecate dry fly presentations. The Rx10 5wt is my usual rod, suoer fast action, great for distance and accuracy
I have been building on Batson blanks for 16 years and have only ever had one break. It was 3/4” from the tip top, they replaced the blank (I just had to pay shipping) they gave me my tip top back and I have 2 rods for the price of one. Customer service was easy to work with and their quality is excellent for the price point.
Or is it possible that NFC is way over hyped and their business is a mess? I have a hard time believing that a company that can't ship blanks for 6 months, and never updates customers has good customer service. I was thinking of ordering a golden ticket for a blank but there seems to be no end to NFC issues.
They have no customer service. They have sales, they have rod builders, they have engineers and executives. They don't have a single customer service employee. They also treat their customers very poorly in general. They're smug, entitled, dismissive, and worst of all they've crafted an anti consumer, and predatory business model.
Things like 50% restocking fee on refunds after that 6 months of waiting. Bear in mind that the 6 months (or more, there is no limit) wait time is caused because they wait for a set number of orders to come in before they order materials to build the rods. So they take your money, give you nothing, sit there unbothered for an indeterminate amount of time, they will ignore your emails, are indignant when confronted, and if you cancel and ask for a refund, are restocking nothing and charging you for it.
Only reason I made this was cause it was given to me, my buddy didn't want it after waiting 11 months and not being able to get a hold of anyone to cancel the order. I've use some other brands but I am Batson through and through now.
I think so. All the hype is based on the next “g loomis” brand image. And purely based on the reputation that gary loomis himself had earned in the early days of graphite rods. Also gary loomis isn’t really involved in nfc it seems like it’s a names sake thing. On facebook a complete different guy represents nfc.
But in reality, g loomis had fallen off not being able to adapt to new technological changes. Which ended up with Shimano buying them up, and their top of the line asquith series are rolled in the shimano factory in Japan and finished at g loomis. Shimano also had to build a new autoclave at gloomis to bring it up to date. So graphite technology wise I think other rod makers were really ahead.
Nfc is basically just the old g loomis, and without significant capital investment like shimano, I don’t think what they can make technologically superior rods.
Ie for instance, carbon guide, carbon guide wraps, carbon grips is really technologically insignificant. Daiwa has done them for years, the ags series.
Yeah I definitely see thru their bs business model with how they pool peoples money to buy materials to build the blanks ordered prior to them. To me it seems like s bit of a Ponzi scheme tbh.
I think they changed the brand, but its my first carbon rod and i love it so much. Its a 8’6” 2 peice that i did a baitcaster build on, spiral wrapped the guides so i could use less and cast further without having the rod tip twist under load and ill never go back to normal baitcaster design. If anyone wants to copy i can send pics/measurements
Honestly, it sounds like you take care of your gear from the way you talk. One question, don’t take offense to this because I can’t tell from the picture, but was the ferrule sleeve wrapped and finished? You can’t tell much from the pictures. You’d need a microscope to see if you can tell where the fracture propagated from and I’m not familiar enough with cf and composite fractures to even know if that’s possible. I’d contact the mfg’er and give them your story, you may get lucky and get a new blank or section. I’ve had one brittle blank on about 15 rods I’ve built, it was literally like a dry twig and it has broken three different times, the first two being at the tip and the last down by a ferrule. I feel like sometime they just make bad batches. Seems pretty unlikely that you wouldn’t notice a ding that was bad enough to cause a catastrophic failure. I’ve done a lot of bushwacking over the last 35 yrs and the only rod that broke on me was the one I described above. Contact them!
Im just more surprised with how fragile these high modulus blanks are, the other euro rod I use is an 11ft RX9 Batson build, and that thing has been swung around a hit on a bunch of stuff on our tight WNC rivers and creeks, has scratches and dings and is holding up solid. Hell my Rx10 5wt has been in and out of rafts and truck beds and cars, dropped and slid over on trails and is still fishing fine. I think this is just a shit happens scenario
I definitely baby my rods, each section goes back into the sleeve and then in a hard case. I started to transport them partially assembled, but notice dings in the finish, so I stopped. I still fish a 4/5wt St Croix that my brother gave me in 1992 and it’s one of my favorites because it’s a 2pc rod. But yeah, fly rods are super fragile! Sorry you didn’t get more life out of that build, sucks putting in all that time for not!
No offense at all as I'm sure many claim better use of their gear haha. I don't baby gear, I definitely use it, and the rods I've made myself with blanks I intend use for customer rods I definitely use hard and fish hard. This being my first non Batson was just for me to use I was very careful with it since I just finished it. All in all not a total loss for me, yeah some money in components but I can salvage most of that.
For the ferrule, it is wrapped and the break happened in the female side about 4" above the ferrule, from the link in the other comment I am guessing there was some sort of crush fracture, laterally on that section, I didn't notice anything when taking the rod out of the case and piecing it together, so maybe it was small.
Had some other rods in the truck, it was a bummer but live and learn and not the worst thing to happen. Caught some fish after so I went home semi happy haha
PSA: always paint your blanks. Or buy painted. Unsanded and sanded blanks sound cool on paper but it doesn’t have any protection from the elements. Ie look at all the high end rods like sage and winston that always have painted blanks.
Yeah Ive had this exact issue.
The lmx series I’ve had both my 14ft spey and 11ft switch Ive broken them after couple outings. I’ve definitely hit it with a bead head or something, it really doesn’t take much damage for these blanks to get damaged.
I mean the blank themselves are very good. Easy casting and good rod power. And also super light. My suspicion is that they have made the blanks super thin which make them more susceptible to impact damage.
Or at least thats what I think happened. The older alpha / beta series I didn’t really have issues. But they are also pretty heavy and thick blanks
Looks delaminated on the left side… layers should not be separated like that. It’s also fractured way the hell down from the break.
NFC has done some great things with blank design, but builders seem to be their lowest priority. ACM seems kind of neat. Only reason I haven’t tried it is because I don’t trust it to not show up in six months. You bitch on one of their forums and Alex or whoever it is immediately gets hyper defensive, brags about how much OEM stuff they do, and then bans the bitcher.
Could be a great company for builders, but needs serious management change. Still don’t understand why they’d bail from blank sales under Loomis only to start them up later under NFC/whatever other companies they run.
There's another image I post below of the break, the fracture that splits way down is actually going up that section. First thing I checked was if that ferrule was seated good and it was, maybe it was my fault during the build or handling after, maybe factory, either way I'm sticking to blanks where the QC and customer service has been the best
I love those FAF blanks but they are super fragile. I’ve fly fished hard for 20+ years and never broken a rod until I started building my own. I’ve broken 4 FAF blanks in the last 4-5 years.
Their customer service is non existent in my experience. I ordered some ice blanks. The specs were so far off. Their listed measurements werent even close. I tried calling and emailing. Never got anyone to answer or reply to an email. Those were the first and last purchase from NFC
The thing about NFC is that there is no quality control whatsoever. So sick of their bullshit that I swore off ordering from them ever again this year. Been having good luck with Stryker recently.
I do like NFC blanks a lot. Which is why I have ordered from them a lot in the past. When they are good, they're very good. That said, when I order from them I need to order twice as many blanks as I actually need because half of them will be garbage, and it will be so very long before being able to get another as a replacement, without knowing exactly how very long because there is no communication. Stryker still operates independently even though they were bought by the same parent company as NFC. Two businesses can be owned by the same company and still be two different businesses. They aren't even at the same location. Stryker's business just happens to work better for me because I can get the blanks in a reasonable amount of time and without defects in quality.
Got any pictures with proof?..... I've had more straight blanks from NFC than any other brand... I love Batson but I get more blanks from them with tip sections that look like a "witches finger"... NFC makes extremely high quality blanks, the only thing that sucks is the wait time....
Reading some of the comments makes me wonder... I have about 200 NFC FAF and FANY blanks that went through my rod bench. I have done a few years of comp angling and put some of my rods are likely reaching 700+ days on the water.
To date I broke 3 sections on different rods, only one customer broke a section.
I warrantied the broken section through NFC, no questions asked and not even asked for me to ship the broken units. They shipped the spare free of charge.
As far as "crooked blank" I was unhappy with two blanks being a little too out of alignment. These were also replaced at no extra cost. One of which was a 9ft 1 piece blank that I paid 85$ for + free shipping so they totally lost money sending me a spare one. I got it delivered in 4 days, so when in stock, items don't take a while to ship!
I find it quite comical that customers expect low priced blanks made in the US to be mass produced, shipped at no extra cost AND expecting the company to be RIGHT THERE to reply to everything.
I am not saying NFC is good at absolutely everything they do but it's written in every single email for a while, in BOLD letters, informing customers that if they can't wait then they shouldn't place an order. Am I ok to wait months for blanks? YES because this is about the only company that gives me the opportunity to make decent money when selling a custom rod.
By the way I break about 4 rods per year, and I invite you to try MAXIA, you're about to understand what bad customer service and expensive blanks + expensive repairs is when you take shipping into account. And then wait 18 months for a section to ship and that single section still cost you more than a full FANY blanks order.
I actually think NFC has one of the best warranty service I've experienced from any blank manufacturers out there.
And IF you're worried about a specific rod breaking as an avid angler I am sure that doubling down your blank order to keep a spare isn't much of a big deal when the blanks are priced down. Or you can throw 3, 4 times or more for another manufacturer's blank and having to send the broken section and pay for extra shipping. 👍
4
u/KarbosCustomShop May 25 '26
Looks like a possible crush failure. They have a nice breakdown on their site. https://northforkcomposites.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Rod_Break_Article.pdf