I'll start off by saying that I looked into this topic many years ago, but I've never actually done it. I'm in the process of replacing the piston and rings in my 036. Over the weekend I slipped the new (OEM) piston in, put a couple of the bolts back into the cylinder, and used a sharpie to mark the edges of the exhaust port onto the new piston to see how much the skirt extended past the exhaust port. On the clutch side, the skirt only extended 1/8" past the mark left by my sharpie. My understanding is that 1/8" is about as low as I should go. On the flywheel side, there was a little more room. On that side, the skirt extended right at 3/32" past the sharpie mark. I'm not sure how much is normal, but if I'm only talking about having 1/32" on one side of the exhaust port, is it really even worth messing with?
I haven't measured the squish yet, but I will. I'm considering doing something different for the base gasket to get my squish down to around .025". I have NO desire to raise or lower my ports, and I'm NOT messing with a timing wheel. I understand the general concepts, and how those are used (but I'd need to watch a few vids again to refresh my memory). Before I'd be willing to do any of that to an OEM cylinder, I'd need to ruin a few Chinese imports first for practice, and I don't have time for that at this point.
I haven't measured the squish yet, but I will. I'm considering doing something different for the base gasket to get my squish down to around .025". I have NO desire to raise or lower my ports, and I'm NOT messing with a timing wheel. I understand the general concepts, and how those are used (but I'd need to watch a few vids again to refresh my memory). Before I'd be willing to do any of that to an OEM cylinder, I'd need to ruin a few Chinese imports first for practice, and I don't have time for that at this point.