I had a little time to work on this today. Here are the changes to the piston and to the cylinder - you can see how much higher the lower edge of the fuel/air intake is (new cylinder on left):
The round intake opening actually matches in the carb mount better. On the piston you can see that they raised the slot where it meets the transfers to fix the problem with the earlier design:
The casting is actually not bad, but they've clearly tried to reduce any deburring steps as much as possible. With the small bore engines I've worked on I do not do that much beveling of ports, as most of the factory ports I've seen in Poulan and Zenoah engines are fairly sharp - but this is beyond that. There were sharp, rough edges in the intake ports, and the edges of the transfers are like a knife all the way around. I could not get a good shot of intake port edges, but this gives some idea of the edge of the transfer castings:
Even the piston pockets had edges you can cut with. I smoothed most of them to take at least the knife edge off - the transfers were hard to get to.
With the measurements I took, and using the new transfer inserts, the timing should be this (I'll have to confirm that when it's back together):
I thought about this a lot a decided that while it is conservative, this is a pole saw/string trimmer - it needs to have power at a lower rpm as the string trimmer just will not spin that fast. So I'm resisting the urge to open everything up, and in particular to raise the exhaust. Further, the strato linkage on this is more progressive and has a later opening than on the GZ4000s I've played with. This means that the engine switches intake port timing, going from a 130 duration (where it will run fairly often) to a 154 duration, and that seems like just what you'd want for this use.
So my strategy is only to widen the exhaust (from the 42% it came with to 55% of the bore), and use the new transfer inserts without notches, just beveled 0.5mm at the top to match the timing of the strato opening to the air valve. It will no longer have the problem created by my transfer insert notches on the first cylinder, where these opened the end of the transfers under the piston at TDC.
Here are the intake ports from inside - I have not modified them (there are some water drops on there):
I took the exhaust port to 55% of the bore:
I also had to sand the plastic transfer inserts to get them to fit properly, which was not hard but I should not have had to do that. I hope to get it back together in the next few days.