Dan, you're not wrong and this is where I'm afraid I have to cross the line and perhaps be a touch unprofessional.
The kit cylinders are crap, just about everything is wrong, the turnings, the cover plates, no relief valves, the shape and size; of course you don't find any of this out until you're this far through the build and add the main assemblies together.
The main problem is that the cylinders are not bolt on, they form the main structural assembly point at the front, to change them now means a complete strip down of the whole chassis and new ones making, as well as taking all the castings off and slide bars etc.
This was supposed to be a quick build out of the box, but has turned into 8 weeks of scratch building hell, actually, if I had started as a pure scratch build from the ground up it would probably have been easier.
I will never ever touch another Warren Shepard kit again.
Okay rant over. The crease in the cylinder casing does vary, some are higher than others, but it'd be inches on the real thing, but it is noticeable; your image isn't helped by the fact that the AWS conduit runs across the top, giving a false indication of the bend in relation to the footplate top.
A view from the other side shows it a lot better.
It also hasn't helped there being a shadow on the model by a poorly placed lamp. Measuring off the GA the bend should be just over 5 mm from the footplate, but I don't know if that's a high or low bend on the real engine; the model is 6 mm.
The biggest problem is the width, the flat areas are too narrow by a couple of mm so that exaggerates the sloped area, the cover should be in line with the valance, it's not. In addition, to get the valance to fit and match up with other parts, it has to be moved out a bit from the real location, this increases the gap between valance and cylinder wrapper even further.
To be blunt, given the far bigger disaster areas on the kit, I wasn't getting overly excited about the slight cylinder mis shape, especially as I know the amount of effort required to correct it at this stage, and, other larger problem areas still left to tackle.....give me strength!
Full strip down is not happening, so the only way is to adjust the shape in situ, there's two ways to do this. Pull the casing off and bin it (it might survive and reform to the new profile without too much damage) with the original kit ones, then try and make a fillet with a butt joint to the front and rear faces and blend it in, that's going to be almost impossible with the turnings in place, you just can't get a file in to smooth the face.
Fillets in red, area to be smoothed in green oval, front and rear.
Problem is, once it's all blended and smoothed then you run the risk of the solder bubbling or the fillet moving when you add the turnings back in. They need a hell of a 'lot' of heat to get them to bond, 400°C with a fat tip on the ERSA 80W doesn't even touch them. Even if the fillets are set with 288°C I reckon the heat from the turnings will loosen them and then you're back to square one.
Second, take all of the turnings off, slide bars and bracket, given the thickness of the frames and turnings that'll be a blow torch job and it'll almost as sure as eggs are eggs, un-solder some of the smaller thinner parts. Then, add a new thin overlay front and rear, add the holes to accept the turnings back in, rebuild it all and add a new wrapper.
The second option has the least opportunities for Captain Cock Up and his merry band to make an appearance, but will be the most time consuming. It'll also be an excellent solution to seal that great big gap currently between the cylinder front and rear walls with the frames, caused by the massive slot to allow the frames to drop in. I could also add those three rivets seen in your photo to add a little more detail.
Luckily the other side only has a few turnings attached, see above, so I can experiment on that side without undoing too much of the current work.
Which ever way you look at it, it's layers of crap, stacked up one on top of another. Sorry for all the negativity, it's been a really really bad week, work, home, medically and now bench.