Too late to Top?

Hey, I recently read Uncle Ben's guide to topping and realized that I have waited too long to properly top my plants to produce 4 colas. I would love some help to try to fix this problem. My plants are currently 1.5 ft tall and have anywhere between 8-10 true nodes. If there was some magic that I could work to remedy this that would be great. My only concern is that if I take my plant back to the 2nd true node now I will lose out on about 1 week of growth.

i'd leave them, take cuttings and try next time

By not topping have I seriously crippled my yield capability?

nope, some guy on here did a comparison and gained around 4g average extra on topped plants against left alone. too many factors will affect yield, light, nutes, air, care

Excellent, thanks for the advice brother. My only concern now is the issue of height. I have 36 plants growing in a 15'/15' room with 8' ceilings. The hoods take up about 1' of the space, the buckets are about 11" tall so I'm left with about 6' of space before the plants will be coming in contact with the lights. My previous grows I've been able to keep the plants about a 1' from the lights and haven't had any problems with them getting burnt. But this is a much larger grow then I've done before with 2 1000 watt Hortilux Blue bulbs. The output is extreme and the heat may be a problem when plants start getting close. Which is why I wanted to top them. I got bad advice from the distributor where I buy all my grow supplies and I was told that I should top them when they are getting too tall. Which I know now, is simply not the case. What do you recommend to control for this potential future problem?