Preparing rough sawn timber

I use a small Delta benchtop joiner (6 inch wide) to flatten a face or straighten and square an edge. A new Porter Cable joiner, which is nearly identical, costs ~$270 new. In truth I would like a larger joiner but this one works for most furniture projects.

For a planer I use a Dewalt DW734 ($400 new) to dimension wood to the desired thickness. I considered the Dewalt DW735 but could not justify the additional $150. The DW734 is excellent for me. I hope this helps.

Both of these throw a lot of wood chips and dust. I bought a dust collector from Harbor Freight for $200 which works great.

if you go to a timber merchant with the wood they’ll very likely machine it for you for a small fee, I would rather have them do it than do it myself, it’s worth trying.

You said, “access to trees.” If this is wet lumber, there’s much to do and a fair bit of waiting, but I can’t advise. However, if you’re talking about wood that is already dry, my current approach is to get “fence flat” with a hand plane, resaw on my bandsaw to get the other face, and then clean up with a hand plane. If the wood is not very out of true, I might skip the band saw and just clean up with a plane. In this case, and often even when resawing, I do not pay much attention to the final thickness in most cases. I use traditional methods for layout relative to a reference face/edge so that it doesn’t matter what the thickness is, whenever possible. I try to make the “fence flat” face not be the reference face. That means I do a quick clean up of the band sawn face, get it out of twist, and I’m good to go. I don’t refine the “fence flat” face further, whenever possible.