The main problem with this spear head (there's always at least one, you know--it's the Law of Windlass) is that the socket is so long. I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of hacksawing or using the Dremel on it but then I remembered the cheap tubing cutter I bought to chop some bike bars. That went through the thin-walled socket in about five turns! As you can see, that narrowed the socket from 1.25" inside diameter to .89". You can see how much I took off. That's about as much as I was comfortable removing as this socket does not extend into the blade proper as it would in the short-socketed examples shown in below.
Ash would be the correct wood for hafting, of course. I have no local source for Ash of proper length and didn't want to to pay shipping for the proverbial pig-in-a-poke Ash dowel. I like being able to personally select for grain, straightness, etc. I thought it would be reasonable to glue together two 1"x2" oak slats and reduce it to 1.25" octagonal. I now have a beautiful oak 2x2 but I'd still have to do a great deal of work to get a haft out of that and it still wouldn't be historically appropriate. I abandoned that idea.
So, it was back to Lowe's to see if I could be happy with Poplar. Of the straight pieces, I found one that was almost white it had so little grain. Another had a prominent grain more reminiscent of Ash and was noticeably heavier than the other Poplar dowel. That'll do. I'll mount the head in the utilitarian manner of the infantry spears shown here. No toggle, tassle or leather banding.
If I decide to dress this up a bit I'll add a rondel. That seems to have been a common treatment on Austrian spears of the late 15th/early 16th c.
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