In my search for 3 pce heavy spinning rods it's pretty much dominated by salmon/steelhead rods in the 8 1/2 to 10 ft range.

Do any you with experience on these travel blanks think they would fit light surf duty, slinging up to 2 oz.? Most are rated up to about 1 3/4 maximum.

Are they fast enough in action to take that sort of casting?

I think you'll be fine, as long as the butt of the rod is bigger than about .6" and the tip is 5/64 or larger. I'm building a hotshot blank to use as a light surf rod and I've built on steelhead blanks in the past. Good luck.

What about an 8-9 WT fly rod. The blank does not know what it is being used for

Try a search using MudHole's rod blank search. Try the following
criteria:

Pieces = 3
Line wt (starts with) 10

You'll find several blanks that will do what you want.

I use 2 steelhead blanks in the surf for stripers and blues in the northeast - they are by far my favorite outfits. One is a Loomis SH1265 which is 10 1/2 feet and will easilly handle 2 oz. The other is a lighter 8 1/2 footer (can't remember the model w/out looking it up) that I cast everything from unleaded Sluggo's to 1.5 oz. plugs with on 8# line. Email me if you want me to dig out the model number of the lighter rod and want to hear me go on extolling the virtues of the setup!

Thanks Ken, I'll do that. I was using casting weight range and line range and it told me that was too restrictive. I guess that search is kinda like this software!!

Jim, over in the UK, even though they don't do as much lure fishing in the surf, there is a plethora of such rods, in 2 and now 3 pce. The same can't be said of the market Stateside, where things are just as good and cheaper.

Ted (and anyone else).

The software that MudHole is using is pretty temperamental (actually not the software per se but the manufacturer's specifications). As they did point out you should try to make it very unrestrictive and play with a couple of different searches. I've had the best success by sticking with # of pieces, Length (includes or starts with), line wts, Butt diameter / Tip size. If you don't get an "answer" try dropping back to "any". The MOST restrictive is "Equals" in any of the fields.