could i fight my dad with this.  

Everything about the asthetics of this katana are excellent. Unfortunatedly, I ordered three and the first one broke against another in 30 seconds. The second lasted about 5 minutes. I am guessing that because this is curved, the wood is cut into a curve instead of being bent into a curve, thus resulting in a non-parallel grain. It would seem easy to fix this by making each wood core with a simple curved laminated wood and/or taking the critical part of the sword, and putting a thin sleeve of fiberglass cloth over this portion. The extra weight would not hurt because these are already much lighter than a light katana.
Oh well.
Just don't expect these to hold up with males of high school age or older.  

after about 50 strikes of the 40" in sword to sword one broke at the handle  

I ordered 2 of these for sparring with my friends and they hold up great; however, one of them was broken during shipping, thus the 4 stars, but I sent an email and they shipped me a new one, no questions asked. Only drawback is that they do hurt when you get hit, but they do not leave bruises.  

This is an excellent training tool. It has survived about a year and a half of abuse with out the rubber falling apart.The only thing that was bad about it was that the sword would actually leave a bruise if I struck at full power. Other than that, it was awesome.  

It is nice practice piece, we use in Aikido disarming techniques. I would not recommend for sword to sword sparring instead of wooden one. Anyway it proven to be solid so far, as my kids class was abusing those a little ;)  

I bought this product and it came in five days!!! even though this isn't used for my martial arts I can still spar with my sword and not a single bruise on anybody. Over all this product is amazing!!!  

I got the big sword and it was wonderful. The big one is wonderful training and it doesn't hurt people. Sure a wooden sword is nice, but u can't vs. your friends like this!  

The shipping is excellent, and upon initial inspection the products quite fine, but they are not very strong at all. I bought four to help fill gaps in my dojo's equipment. I broke one myself without even hitting another object. The sword was simply not strong enough to cope with the stresses involved in a thorough exercise. Since then another of the initial four has been broken, and I have retired the remainder for children's exercises only. I don't even want to consider what would happen if you struck them against something solid.  

This sword arrived to my door in seven days and it was shipped using the $2.95 shipping and it came all the way from New York!! This sword is sturdy and it has a small curve to it like a real samurai sword. The sword is a little heavier than it says, but it is still very light and not heavier than 3 pounds. This is a great sword and I recomment it to whoever is starting out.  

This is great for practice because you can actually hit solid objects (or people) without fear of damage to your bokken or the other person.  

These swords are OK if you want to do light training. Once the foam starts to get cut up a bit, it is only a short matter of time before it will completely fall off. If you want to do more strenuous training, go for a wooden sword.