hi I'm and some of you may know me as animal trades and today I'm going to show you how I made this handle for my carving axe that I forged a few weeks ago this is quite a short handle but the process of fitting the handle to the eye of the axe is pretty much across the board so you should be able to watch it and apply it to any we handling needs that you may have the most important thing when you're choosing a piece of wood is you want the grain to run straight through from the tip of the handle all the way through the head of the axe because that's where the strength of the wood comes from if you were to cut this out of example like crops grain and these were the lines going this way then you're actually extremely fragile and the first few whacks that you did with it it would crumble so the way that I tell that the grain is running through is I literally just look at these lines and as long as a few of the lines run through the entire piece of the wood I know I'm good to go similarly I do the same thing with spoon handles where spoon handles get their strength is by having a line of grain that runs through the entire the entire body of the spoon into the head of the spoon so curved spoons you have to use a curved piece of wood and so on and so forth so just be very careful with your grande selection cut it and cut it out on the bandsaw and then you're ready to do your shaping on the basic tools that I might use these are a spokeshave a rasp and file this is the file this is the rest I grab them out of order and a draw knife that I've forged a few weeks ago this needs to match this so that I can get it in there a little bit of play and you want it to have a tiny bit of wiggle room because you're going to put a wedge in there so as I'm fitting it I can look and see where the wood is getting pinched because then I know where there's a high point in the wood and where I need to continue to remove material I'm just going to take and use my knife to carve away the areas where there was high spots that prevented the head of the axe from getting seated I'm basically gonna cut the wedge and square across the grain you want to get your wedge in place anyway I don't really actually love the way that this is seated so I'm gonna take it out alright if you're a dummy like me and you set the hand you set the head before you were a hundred percent sure it was actually ready to go you can take the head off by setting two pieces of wood because you really want to protect the head of the axe and I have the back just leaning on a scrap piece of wood and the front thing on another scrub and I don't take a straight punch this is the same shape as the head of the oh hi Katie and I'm going to just give it a couple gentle taps and then we can take the head off like that so that we can then go and fix up those little areas where you see their shininess or while actually in this case dirt on the wood so we'll go in and fix that okay so we have adjusted our fit I took away all the high spots that were shown by the axe head when I took it off and now I am ready to seat it for real this time I'm just hey that's what we like to see alright I will use a action hammer to the witch and sweet it's there any food store on Amazon and I mean it just brings up in so many pieces of wood I love the way that it looks the way this little hand okay not the end grain is always the thirstiest and of course my metal isn't going to be sad if it gets a little flex oil in it either we yes this is a new channel I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this please subscribe leave a comment I'm always looking for new projects that people want help tackling and yes thank you so much for watching