Torque setting for head nuts? Options

[KaptKaos]

Haynes says 23 lb and give a tightening diagram.

That 23 lbs included the old head gaskets, which I am not using.

Does the torque setting need to be tighter without head gaskets?

If so, what?

TIA

[Cap'n Krusty]

I see my name, but don't know why it's in a post.

My opinion after 37 years of building 914 engines:

A: Yes VW dropped the head gaskets, BUT ONLY ON THE 2.0 BUS ENGINES, and only when doing a rebuild. They also changed the head design. If you leave out the gaskets but use the original 2.0 BUS HEADS, you must add a spacer to the base of each cylinder to bring the compression back to specs. Porsche NEVER dropped the head gaskets, and never specified or suggested they be eliminated.

Jake has had great success with deleting the head gaskets. He has his own reasons, and his own experience. His experience is much shorter than mine, but he has done far more engines than I, and has done an amazing amount of R&D on the T4.
HOWEVER, I doubt he deletes the gaskets on all his engines because "VW did it".
That is a LAME excuse, and not even any kind of defensible reason, and it's taken out of context.

B: Competent machinists use a vertical mill to surface 914 heads. Mills are huge, heavy, and designed to deliver precise, repeatable cuts to the work at hand. You're taking a pair of matched precision surfaces, separated by an inch or more of material, and lapping them by hand? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING! I, for one, am not blessed with either the eyesight or the hand/eye coordination to lap a pair of cylinders to a cylinder head with any sort of planar accuracy, especially to .0001". How do you know you're holding the cylinders at precisely 90 degrees to the surface of the head? How about the depth of cut? I doubt you, or anyone else on this planet, can match the accuracy of that mill in the hands of a competent machinist. If your machinist isn't all that competent, we've just moved to another subject altogether ................

The Cap'n