As I recall, Ziad used the volume rendering plugin to decide what a good threshold for each subject was -- I think he was about the first user of this plugin, in fact. The
-1clip xx option is the 3dmerge function to use for this thresholding, once you've figured out what 'xx' should be; the clustering option you described is the correct way to cluster with 3dmerge.
You can interactively use the new rendering plugin to set a threshold and clusterize, if the angio dataset is loaded as the Overlay, and use the "Show Thru" mode to have the above-threshold voxels shine through the brain.
bob cox