The best handles? I've worn out so many wood handled axes, mauls and hatchets that I consider wood something cheap and easy to replace, but not as reliable as fiberglass. However, the best handles I've ever used were the steel pipes grandpa welded onto his axeheads, and loaded with a powder that absolutely deadened the handle and made it such a pleasure to swing I prefered it anytime we were at his house splitting old growth fir and hemlock, which anyone with any woodsplitting experience will tell you is atrocious wood to split by hand. I dunno what the powder was he put in the pipe, but he worked as a machinist at the Bremerton shipyards since WWII, and he had tons of stuff in his myriad sheds that he played with like that. We never had a head come off, nor a pipe bend, chip, splinter, or crack, in twenty years of heavy chopping. My brother and I used to swing a pair of 8 lb mauls into the big rounds, and occasionally we'd embed one and use the back of the other to sledge our way through a particularly nasty piece (sometimes adding up to three wedges along with). I'd hold the embedded maul handle while my brother would pound blows on the back of it with his, and my hands never got jarred near as bad as when we tried that with wooden handles. We had a number of double bit heads with pipe handles, and the extra weight sure made quick work of limbing on felled logs. Of course, we never tried chopping through logs with an axe, that was what the saws were for.