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Posted by: J.B. Hunt (---.pool.dsl.logantele.com)

Date: July 11, 2010 07:03PM

I built a Drop Shot rod for a good customer and built it as Spinning. He broke the 7' one piece rod 4 days later.
He brought the rod back to me complaining it broke on a hook set. He described the situation to me in pretty good detail.
I could see immediately the break was an extreme torsional break.
He said before he realized it the Bass had taken the bait back in under the boat to his right . He immediately took up slack and set the hook hard. ( he said this was a big fish) He said also he set the hook to his left, hard to his left. He said he had done that many times before and never broke a rod. I suggested he had been very lucky many times before.
I thought , now is the time to teach a very good lesson. I got out RM Vol 12-6 and let him read the article "Spiral Failures" and look at photo # 14 while I set up a Spinning rod ( an old factory rod). I tied the line to the bottom of the chair leg he was sitting in and put a full load on the rod like it looked when he set the hook on the fish. I had him look at the tip top and tell me what it was doing while I pulled hard up and to my left, trying to replicate a hook set. As I mocked a hook set my right hand was rotating the reel to my left, pointing away from the fish, such as he did . I asked him what the tip top was doing, he said," It's not doing anything , now I see why it broke ".
He said he had set the hook many times sideways and never realized how much stress he was putting on the rod. But he said , this fish was under the boat, which makes matters even worse.
Good lesson learned and I sold him another rod.
Thanks again Tom for breaking all those perfectly good blanks and putting the info in Rm for all of us to learn from.

J.B.Hunt
Bowling Green, KY

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