My dad came up with an interesting suggestion to explain why the cylinder pressures are all over the shop. Since the engine is a high CR engine, the volume that remains when the piston is at TDC is very small so any imperfections in the chamber result in varying pressures. Since we manually seated the valves using grinding past the valves all sit at different heights resulting in varying cylinder volumes. I know for a fact that we had issues with number 1 where we had to grind it a long way to get rid of a score in the seat and it is one of the lower results. Number 5 is possibly in the same boat.
This is probably not the only reason but i'm sure it could well be a contributor.

