PostgreSQL - Long key - Clustering problem

I am having problems with clustering a table where the key consists of one char(23) field and two TimeStamp fields. The char(23) field contains Alpha-Numeric values. The clustering operation never finishes. I have let it run for 24 hours and it still did not finish.

Has anyone run into this kind of problem before? Is my theory that the reason is the long key field makes sense? We have dealt with much larger tables that do not have long keys and we have always been able to perform DB operations on them without any problem. That makes me think that it might have to do with the size of the key in this case.