Rick, that's an interesting thought. You could torque it less. I suppose perhaps it would be less sensitive that way (or would it be more sensitive--I'm not sure).

Piston slap is a funny thing. If you take the head off the engine (don't bother, just for sake of example) you can move the piston around in the cylinder. I'm not sure if it's the piston contacting the cylinder, or the ring stopping the piston from moving around, or what. But the pistons have a lot of play from side to side, when there is significant piston slap.

A lot of Volvo dealers tried valiantly to fix the piston slap in B230 engines. They replaced pistons, rod bearings, you name it. And yet the problems persisted. Finally it was realized that piston slap didn't necessarily mean the end of the road for the engine. It IS noisy and irritating, but it's not a death sentence. You often have a long way ahead of you, despite the piston slap.

It's considered mostly harmless as long as it isn't accompanied by a bad cylinder compression reading, bad rod bearings, etc. If the fundamentals are all together, then you should be OK.

If you have valve noise, there are things that go wrong in the valvetrain that are simple to fix without major surgery.

I still think that you might have a defective or faulty knock sensor if you are getting that kind of behavior. Otherwise a lot of other cars would do it also. But clean the thing up and put it back in like you had mentioned. You never know what will come of it.
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Chris Herbst, near Chicago, IL. 93 940, 91 240, 90 240, 88 740, 87 240