A day or two ago I remounted the handle in a fairly heavy hand sledge that had loosened and was shifting a bit too much. I had been using it in the woodshop to split wood using splitting wedges. I had not put the handle in it. I probably bought it at auction or maybe my father had bought it at auction. It had one regular steel wedge in it and several nails of various sizes and a small stove bolt.
I managed to get everything out of it and drive the handle out. I got it cleaned up and coated it with Gorilla white wood glue (I forget what they call it right now) and drove it back in. I grabbed a wood scrap and split off a wedge with a hatchet and shaped it a little with a sharp chisel. I put the hammer in a vise, added more wood glue and drove the wood wedge tightly in the gap. I also cut some splinters to fit the other holes that were in the end and drove them down in the glue filled holes. That made it all tight, then I drove the regular steel hammer wedge back in. I let it sit overnight and sanded the excess dried glue off of the wedge area.
All in all a very simple job and one I have done maybe 50 times or more over the years but one of the kind of silly little things that I quite enjoy.
I often buy "job lots" of "misc" at auctions, maybe 4 or 5 boxes at a time if I see something in there I want and it is not uncommon to find a nice hammer head missing its handle down in a box. Sometimes it's a hammer where someone has broken a handle and stuck some god-awful stick in it as a replacement.
Some of those hammers of course are only fit for the scrap iron pile but many are very nice hammer heads. I maybe have a couple of dozen of various kinds accumulated in a wood box. Claw hammers, ball-pein, and hatchets. I hope to get around to installing a batch of them this winter. I got on a binge some years ago and did about 8 new axe handles in one run. I have some handles that I have bought but I also want to cut some from scratch. I have a number of dry blocks of several kinds of wood that should serve well. Last night I was splitting a couple blocks of black locust from some logs that my son brought me for firewood from a side job he and a co-worker did last year. That stuff was absolutely beautiful. The grain in that 24" long block was steel rule straight. I now have a few blocks of it stuck back.
It's been drying for at least a year with no splits or checking. It should make very nice handles even if it is quite hard.Note: Handles that I install NEVER loosen up.
Fun stuff...
.