Before I send off my cylinder to be decked 3mm for the spacer and mill the head .030" I thought I should check if my cylinder head nuts are going to bottom out before I can get to full torque. So after adding the head gasket thickness, the thickness of the milled head and the thickness of the cut cylinders, the cylinder head nuts bottom out very close to my total installed height of all the parts. I ran a tap through 1 head nut and got very little additional thread. The nuts are tapped about 1" and the cylinder studs have about 1" of thread so the nuts are fully bottomed on the studs.
Without drilling and tapping for more thread the nuts still bottom out where the un-threaded portion of the stud starts. I was thinking about buying some stainless flat washers to put under each head nut between the sealing washer and the lock washer. I'm pretty confident that will give me the room (threads) I need to torque the head properly and have ZERO problems. Besides those lock washers tear the hell out of those sealing washers when torqued. The extra flat washer between the lock washer and seal washer would definitely deter that situation.
Have any of you motor heads ran into this before and have any cost prohibitive solutions to offer???
I have built probably eight or ten motors using this method and never had a problem.
Fitted 4mm spacer plate and removed 4mm off the top of the block,
Using standard studs and bolts
You could also do it like I did. Get some SS allen head bolts, cut them off, and weld them to the original threaded sleaves, and make them any length you like.
You don't need the lock waskers, and you don't have to run the sealing washers. I did use hardened SS flat washers though.