The clamps call for a 3/4″ pipe with an O.D. of 1.0625 (that’s an outside diameter of no greater than 1 1/16″). So yesterday I picked up two 10′ sections that matched the exact specs, and were threaded at both ends, and had the guy at HD cut them in half for me. I figured 5′  lengths should suffice. I brought them home and proceeded to attached the fixtures. Turns out that the inside diameter of each of the clutch discs was exactly the same size as the pipe – not even remotely allowing them to fit over the pipes. I went back to Rockler’s website to see if I could find any information that might help me out and I happen to click on the ‘Reviews‘ tab - to my unpleasant surprise I come to find that just about everyone who’s purchased these silly things has had the exact same problem. Now mind you – these reviews didn’t exist when I bought these clamps – had I seen them back then, you can definitely be sure I wouldn’t have made the purchase.

I knew that the clutch rings needed to be grinded down just a hair, but didn’t really have anything that could do the job. I thought maybe something like a small grinding stone that you can get for one of those Dremel tools would work, so this afternoon I picked up both a small rotary file and grinding stone bit that I could use in my drill. Using the file to get the initial material off first first, then following it up with the grinding stone, worked like a charm. It took me about an hour to do though because there were 16 of them and there was a lot of grinding and checking for fit, grinding some more, and checking some more… After all that, I was finally able to attach the fixtures without any issue. I reversed the position of the clutches too, because they seemed to work better when inserted opposite the way they came packaged.