I have several old handsaws that I bought to restore. They're all as dull as you might expect, and I've just recently finished acquiring the tools to sharpen them. You can certainly just clamp them up in your bench vise and sharpen them there, but I had seen others online using a saw vise to elevate the work to a more comfortable height, and I wanted to build one. I looked at lots of images online, and here's what I came up with.
The extra long tail at the bottom is meat to go in a bench vise.
The vise tightens via a piece of 1/2 inch threaded rod pinned and glued to a wooden cylinder on the front.
It is a dedicated tool, so the jaws only open far enough to get a sawblade in there.
I used a knuckle joint to join the moving jaw to the fixed one. This is more complicated than it needed to be, but I really think taking the time to make a tool like this look nice helps encourage you to use it.
I don't have a lathe, so I made the cylinder at the front from a square block of douglas fir with a chisel and a #4 plane.
The tommy bar is a piece of 3/8 steel rod with threads cut on the end to receive nuts.
The jaws are joined to the uprights with full width through tenons.
I welded a plate to a nut to receive the threaded rod and apply the clamping force. It is attached to the back of the fixed jaw with the nut fitting into a recess drilled into the back of the jaw so it doesn't show.
I stained it with a dark stain to match the old examples I saw online, and then applied my usual water borne polyurethane.
I am really happy with how it turned out, now I just need to put it to use and learn how to sharpen some saws!
