Please feel free to add your own tricks !

Marking out.

Use H pencils instead of the standard HB grade. They “keep an edge” for much longer and you will spend a lot less time sharpening your pencil. I won’t go harder, otherwise you might score the wood.

Glue squeeze-out.

Since most standard wood glues dry almost colorless, any squeeze-out is hard to see until you apply the stain and see the telltale white spot. To solve this problem, tint your glue with ordinary food coloring. A few drops of red or green will make squeeze-out highly visible. I your taste in color is less radical, mix equal amounts of red and green to make a pleasant brown.

Scribing large circles.

If you don’t have trammel points, here’s an inexpensive and easy-to-make alternative. First cut a long hardwood beam to fit the hole in your marking gauge. This beam must be longer than the radius of your circle. Make a vertical saw cut in one end of the beam and drill a hole through the cut to hold a pencil. Now, drive a brad in the bottom of the gauge to serve as a compass point, install the beam in the gauge block and you’re ready to scribe a circle with a radius the length of the beam