Gentlemen, thank you very much for this wealth of information. My next step will be to get the torque plates to a grind shop to ensure that they are flat. I will report back with what I find.

Cheers,

Gunther

Well, the plates were a train wreck. When the cylinder was sitting in the bottom plate I was able to rock it perceptibly; it was not sitting flat. Also, the top plate made contact with the cylinder in an area other than where the cylinder would contact the cylinder head; the recess was too deep into the plate. On top of all this, the aforementioned contact area was not parallel with the top of the torque plate where the nuts tightened down, creating a wedge effect on tightening I would think.

The grinding guy had a good laugh when I told him what the plates were for. After some swearing in french at the apparent lack of skills the plate maker displayed he took the plates and told me to call him later. I picked them up today and they check out very nicely. I will put a cylinder in tomorrow and check for distortion; I will post the results.

Thanks again guys, you really help us noobs out with your advice!

http://gkr69s.smugmug.com/photos/i-M...-Mrw2K3r-M.jpg

Cylinder Distortion Solved!
 

Well, it turns out that the plates were the cause of my 5 thou of an inch out-of- round readings when the cylinders were torqued down in the jig. The redone plates gave a very different result.

If I look at all the measurement numbers I took from the six cylinders I conclude that, under fastening torque, the cylinder diameter decreases at the top and bottom and increases in the middle. We are not talking a whole lot though. I was measuring in metric and one hundredth of a mm distortion was the largest change over unstressed. That is around five ten thousandths of an inch; a lot better than five thou of an inch.

Thanks again guys for steering me in the right direction. I hope I described the inch measurements properly; those ten thousandths of an inch are a bit of a mouthful.

Good deal, Gunther! Those plates look nice.