I finally got around to fixing the missing grip on the old monkey wrench I bought for $3 at a garage sale, and then I went ahead and bent up a nice handle for the top side.

 

 

The grip is made from an old broken sledge hammer handle (not the half a handle next to it, which is the remnants from re-handling my short handled sledge and is now used for straightening bent twists), quartered, and then meticulously shaped to fit the handle, glued together with high strength wood glue. While doing the final shaping, everything came out looking too polished for me, so I used a solution of peroxide, vinegar and salt to re-rust the handle, and generally tried to be as dirty about it as possible to make the grips look aged.

 

The handle at the top I believe is actually stainless, but since all I was doing was bending and twisting it, and I don't need the weld to be super strong (I've tried breaking it and I cannot so it's strong enough) I went ahead and used it anyway because it was the right size and shape.

 

So far I've just used it to put a couple of decorative twists on a poker (using my recently acquired, repaired and mounted post vise, but that's a story for another thread), and it worked just fine.

Oh wow, had to go look in the truck to make sure you hadn't stolen my monkey wrench. Looks good. Incidentally, is that the old "toothbrush" from the M-16 cleaning kit in the first pic?

Ha! Not from an M-16 kit, it's actually a used toothbrush from probably 1990-something, though I often use it for the same purpose as the M-16 brush.