Head gasket woes

Bewy said
Bolts are 0.300" shorter?? That is 3/10 ths of an inch, that is huge. That would be 1/2 to a 1/3 of the available thread engagement that is missing. That means the threads that are engaged are taking much more of the load than designed for & could cause bore distort

SSG_Karg said
Pictures of gasket damage? I’m thinking something wasn’t surfaced correctly.

I'll post up more pics. Conversation with ARP tech this morning, then the supervisor called me back. Supervisor stated: "if you have a fire ring that thick, .053, bring it up to torque, then back them off, 1/16 and bring torque back up. The fire ring needs to get crushed as much as possible.

Discussed the washers and shorter hardware length. ARP position is there is no need to exceed thread engagement beyond the necessary torque load of the fastener.

I hunted up some oem hardware from my stash and will likely use fel pro gasket with oem hardware and give it a shot. Obviously, going through the tune up before it gets hammered again. Thank you all for the responses.