I just purchased one of these for a friend, and he would like to use it to spar with me. I don't have a saber, nor do I particularly plan on getting one, so I was wondering if I could spar with him using a practice blade, or will that break the saber? For reference, the practice blade is a Cold Steel polypropylene training blade, and the saber I got him is UltraEdge Heavy Grade.
I have one of the Cold Steel polypropylene katanas. They're nice. Yes, you can spar with that against a heavy grade saber blade. I'm willing to bet you'll break the tip off of the saber blade at some point though (see this thread for why, specifically firehand10k's post:
http://www.saberforum.com/index.php?topic=45229.0 . Also from personal experience I've broken a few tips off, thankfully none that I couldn't just glue back on.), so your friend may want to have an extra blade or two handy. But you're not going to break the blade any lower than that, so you don't have to worry about half a blade breaking off or anything like that (at least not without special effort that would be way outside the realm of normal sparring). And it's going to get A LOT of scuff/scrape marks on it, so if he wants to be able to display the saber and have it look nice, he'll need another blade for that too.
I stand corrected I did not think saber blades were that durable against heavy sparring. That being said any other Martial artists here that have used there saber in a hard strike match?
That's all I use my UltraSabers for. And why I only buy Heavy Grade blades. (Ok, fine, technically I use them for forms practice as well, but all sparring is full speed, full contact).