Auto LOD issue with smoothed normals

Hi,
When generating multiple LOD using the in-built tool in UE, I get unexpected normal on LODS
My high res (200k) object has smoothed normal, and imports fine.

For this project, I need the lower LOD (LOD4) to be a sharp low poly, with no smoothed normals.

  1. Going to LOD settings>LOD4>reduction settings> tick recompute normal and set hard edge angle to 0.1 stills gives me a smoothed mesh.
  2. Strangely enough even when manually reimporting a different external mesh (optimized in 3dsmax, exported as FBX), It imports with smoothed normal. The same mesh, imported as a simple static mesh looks blocky as it should.

The workflow I would expect is to load up the large mesh, use the auto LOD in UE, and manually change settings per LOD to have the result I want for each. At the moment, it is not behaving as expected. Am I doing something wrong?