After I finished the sheath, I started to carve a handle. I went off to my summer cottage and picked up a birch piece that I felled at the end of last summer and has been drying outside since then. I based the handle on the original handle when I made the new one, but added a little extra thickness at the end to get a stable grip, I also made the handle itself a little more egg-shaped in the cross section.

I usually leave a little thicker part on the handle just below the socket, partly so that the hand can run easily from the shaft to the socket, and also to have some material to take off if I would need to reseat the head on the shaft.

The handle was rougly axed, roughly carved, then dried and finally carved to the final shape. No sandpaper was used but only thin, thin shavings taken off with a sharp knife. After I had finished carving the handle I polished it with some of it’s shavings.

Then I started the rather long process of fitting handle. It is always a small gamble as old axes with sockets are not always so predictable as to how they want to sit on their handles. Here I also discovered the problem that after my rust removal, the inside of the shaft was so clean that I could no longer see the marks after where the handle ended at after each fit. To solve this, I had to "dirty" the inside with pencil a bit sometimes during the process.

When the handle was done I sawed the kerf for the wedge with a thin Japanese saw, then I made sure to oil the part of the handle that would be inserted into the socket properly, as this becomes a little hard to reach after the handle has been fitted. I then fitted the head to the handle, and wedged it in place (which I also oiled in with roslagsmahogny). After I assured myself that the head was on correctly, I cut off and carved the end of the handle to the shape I wanted. I had waited with this so as not to crack any part of the handle during the rather violent process of fitting the head, where you hit the handle-end with a mallet to seat the head.

After I had finished carving the handle-end, I oiled the entire shaft with roslagsmahogny. It of course draws more into the endgrain of the handle, than the sides of the handle which makes the ends of the handle become noticeably darker.