throwout bearing to fingers gap?

Long time ago, while my 65 Barracuda still had its original 273, one arm of the Z-bar tore partly away from the shaft. Since I had zero mechanical experience at the time, I let a local shop sorta straighten it out and re-weld the arm. But they didn't get it in the right place. Clutch pedal ended up being maybe halfway to the floor when released. OK, I sez, I'll just adjust the clutch until I get the pedal where it's supposed to be. Problem now was that the clutch was still partly disengaged even when my foot was off the pedal. Can you say "major clutch slippage?" Ended up ruining that clutch. So I replaced the clutch and the Z bar with new. Before installing the Z bar, I took it to a better shop that welded reinforcements to the arms of the Z bar. Must have worked, because even after I replaced the factory clutch with a Weber whose pressure would kill my left knee, that reinforced Z bar lasted until I replaced the whole clutch/flywheel assembly and Z bar with 340 stuff. OK, now nothing was original, Z bar and its arms were not in exactly the same place, and the arms weren't the same length. With the pedal height set to factory specs, the departure clearance (as I recall, been a long time) was no longer correct. After some research (not so easy in those pre-internet days), I found out what the release gap was supposed to be, set it first, then figured out what I needed to get the pedal at the right height. Understand I was still quite the novice. Anyway, I ended up moving the pivot at the top of the clutch pedal, which put everything more or less correct.

So my point in #7 above is that setting the pedal gap is satisfactory if you have all original stuff in good shape. But in any other circumstances, setting that alone to factory specs won't guarantee you'll end up where you need to be.