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The Quest for an Affordable Dust-Collecting Cyclone, Part 1: Which to Buy?
Two things:
If your goal is wood chip collection, then go with the smaller units you've listed above. If it is a choice for a bigger unit, then everything points to Clear Vue. They seem to have the best on the market. That's the direction I'm going.
http://www.jpthien.com/cy.htm
I've got one I built into the lid of a 20 gallon plastic drum from the food shipping industry, connected to a Harbor Freight 1hp dust collector with aftermarket dust bag, and collecting through about 20 feet of 4" semi-rigid hose, and 10 more feet of 4 inch "Dust Right" hose from Rockler, which is SUPER flexy and collapses very small (awesome hose). It usually connects to a bristle head on my CNC router, where it happily collects all the dust from full-pass MDF cuts. I also disconnect it and use it through a few little end adapters for belt sanding, or even just propped up on the table in front of me while I hand sand. The whole apparatus sits underneath the CNC table, and is quite compact.
The Theil separator captures nearly all the dust. I empty the main canister (from nearly full) 3 or 4 times before I have to clean the dust bag on the Harbor Freight dust collector.
The big differences would be the size of the collection vessel (which I like about the separator plans - you can pick any size vessel you want), knowing that larger will be more efficient, and having a solid dust collector fan. I don't recommend using a shop-vac - they are optimized for high pressure, low volume, where the dust collectors are designed for lower pressure, but very high volume. The Harbor Freight 1hp unit works fine, but is the first thing I'll eventually upgrade on mine.