I took a spring from an ink pen and and small washer I had for rivets as rest on and that put extra tension on the dial indicator plunger so it wasn't all over the place.

You may know this already... Make sure you record all of your torque figures in accordance to the stretch on each bolt... I could save you a ton of time in the future if for some unfortunate reason you would have to break the rods down.
example 79'lbs = .0049 stretch.