[Fot] Deck clearance

[Charly Mitchel]

		 Friends,
I'm building a race motor for my TR6 and have a few questions
about the deck clearance.  On the last motor I built, I made the block zero
deck clearance on all the pistons.  To do this I had to shave the top of
several pistons and mill the block .020".  The motor I'm using now is a later
TR6 motor with the recesses for the head gasket seal.  This recess is about
.030".
While measuring the piston travel for each cylinder I find the
distance from the top of the block varies from .004" to .013".  I tried
swapping pistons around to see if there was variance in rod centers and this
seemed to make no difference.  I'm guessing this is from maching of the crank.
While I was pick up my block from the machine shop I was speaking to a fellow
that was building Ford 4 cylinder racing motors and he was saying he likes to
have the piston .008" above the deck.  This is supposed to help with
combustion swirl (I think that is what he called it).
The thoughts I'm having
is has anyone tried this with the TR 6 cylinder motor and if so what were the
improvements if any?
This would be fairly easy for me to do at this point and
would do it if it made sense.
I'm also concerned with partially milling off
the recess around the bore and what consequences that may have.  I have no
problem completely removing the recess since that is the style of the earlier
6 motors.

Thanks for any input.
Charly Mitchel
TR6 #44