Have you turned crankshaft back and forth, removed stopper bolt and waited for 5 minutes before checking tensioner gap? This is mentioned in FSM pages EM-18 - EM-20.
I also had to push tensioner a lot to get bolts started. But after following steps in FSM tensioner gap was finally set to about 4.5 mm (FSM values 3.5 - 5.2 mm).