Here's the definition of \@makechapterhead
- the macro in charge of setting the chapter heading components (I've added indentation):
\def\@makechapterhead#1{%
\vglue10pt
\SpaceAboveChapterNumber=36pt
{\parindent \z@
\interlinepenalty\@M
\Large
\hbox to\textwidth{\hbox{\chapternumberfont CHAPTER
\the\c@chapter}\hfill\vrule depth12pt width0pt}
\hrule height3pt
\vtop to22.5pc{\vfill
\hyphenpenalty10000
\raggedright
\parfillskip=0pt
\LARGE\boldmath\bfseries\chaptertitlefont
#1\vskip1pc
\hrule height 1pt
\vskip7pc}}
\dooffprintinfo}
After setting the chapter number, the chapter title is set inside a box of height 22.5pc
. The top of this box has a \vfill
to push everything inside to the bottom. Then, at the bottom, there's the chapter title (set \raggedright
), a small skip (\vskip1pc
), a horizontal rule (\hrule height 1pt
) and then a large skip (\vskip7pc
). Here's a visual of the last major skips (the showframe
package was added to highlight the text block boundary):

You can patch \@makechapterhead
to remove this using etoolbox
, or edit the template to change the lengths. Below is an etoolbox
patch, which reduced the large 22.5pc
vertical box to 10pc
and also only leaving a 2pc
gap between the horizontal rule and the start of the chapter text.
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
% Reduce chapter title vertical box height
\patchcmd{\@makechapterhead}% <cmd>
{\vtop to22.5pc}% <search>
{\vtop to10pc}% <replace>
{}{}% <success><failure>
% Reduce space between chapter title and main text
\patchcmd{\@makechapterhead}% <cmd>
{\vskip7pc}% <search>
{\vskip2pc}% <replace>
{}{}% <success><failure>
\makeatother
