This is pretty cool. These guys fire a 50 cal at the edge of a katana and the blade actually splits the bullets....

http://www.thatvideosite.com/view/466.html

waste of a perfectly good blade....

I've seen that before. Its kind of interesting like being a jedi is interesting but after thinking about it it is no big surprise sice steel is harder than lead. It does make for a neat video though.

And I thought that Lancelot Chan's sword testing was brutal!!!

Note to self: Don't attack someone with a machine gun if all I have is a sword.

I wonder what some of the other modern sword recreations would do in this kind of test. Though I don't think Arms and Armour or Albion would be too keen to see their hard work get blasted to pieces.

...

"Split the ball" is a common blackpowder/muzzleloader/rendezvous shooting event. Two clay targets are placed on either side of a double-bitted axe (one edge in endgrain of a log, other towards shooter), the objective being of course to split the ball on the axe edge and break both targets. Like others have said, it's old and not particularly indicitive of any supernatural power, just fun.

At last the MG's got their revenge for all those barrels that were chopped in two by katanas in WW2