After some digging, I believe your intent may have been to guide me to later use Fictitious Clearance to restore the geometry dimensions after setting up the contact flush as you describe. Which would make a ton of sense, and I can see how it would help the solver.
I doesn’t help that Fictitious Clearance is not clearly defined in the SimScale documentation – I posted a suggestion to clarify the doc. It is usually known as something like Contact Offset in other software, but examples that are the first find are usually setup starting with the geometric interference like I did and let the contact solve.
I will update the geometry later and follow your steps and report on progress. I appreciate you following up on my topic @goncalves, please be patient, I only ask these questions to understand the suggestions, and it took me a while without understanding this key point. My hope is that this topic can be useful to others as well.