"Chris-TKM is right though, a club even we should be looking at fit-and-forget."
Your interpretation is wrong though. We should never be in the situation of 'fit and forget'.
The aviation community is understandably concerned about component failure and their engineering pages are full of examples of bits, some of them high grade thick steel that have suddenly and catastrophically failed. The detailed analyses that accompany these examples often show that the final failure can be very sudden and very extensive, though there are often microscopic cracks that have given considerable advance warning.
In other words, just thickening the metal is no guarantee that axles will stop failing, while going over the axle with a magnifying glass, concentrating on stress raisers, such as keyways, scratches and rust (even pits shallower than a human hair) would probably prevent a lot of failures.
My memory of the 30mm axle was that it bent far more readily than the 50mm axle, one could surmise that we are seeing more failures simply because the axles are lasting long enough to fail and not being examined. In the days of the 30mm axle, they were bent and replaced before breakage became an issue.
But, without reports of why the axles failed ( a report from the MSA engineering department in the magazine?) we are all just speculating.
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