... the avg voltage has climbed to 1.17v on all chips - think theres a settling period or something..
You're very likely seeing the resistance of the pencil carbon change as it warms and cools. Once you've established the ideal nominal resistance you might want to replace the resistor/pencil for temperature stable resistors. Could also just be carbon flaking off?
As far as overloading the parts is concerned, that little buck regulator is only rated to ~30A, but is capable of supplying much more (core is rated to 40A IIRC). It has built-in thermal protection so the chances of frying it are low - instead of smoke you would instead have thermal shutdowns until the temp returns to 'safe' level.
These shutdowns can be mitigated or even avoided if heat sinks are applied to the back side of the regulator, (which is on the back side of the PCBs obviously). We did this pretty extensively when modding bitfury boards, which use the same part:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251966.msg3152210#msg3152210