[elhigh]

The only degrees I have are my temperature, and a buddy tried to fly this idea past me. I raised the same questions you did: how in the world would you balance it? It doesn't take advanced edumecationing to know this would be a dog's breakfast.

I put it to my friend: why not just make all the cylinders work as well as you can possibly make them? Dropping out a couple of jugs when you don't need them is well and good, but mixing cylinder sizes in one engine feels like creating a problem for the intellectual challenge of then fixing it.

SAAB had a design a long time ago for a variable compression engine; one side of the top end was hinged from the bottom end, and a hydraulic servo would move the top up and down to bigger- and smallerize the combustion chamber as necessary.

You'll notice that SAAB didn't follow up on it, instead spending their time developing their brilliant turbo engines, a similarly effective and much more achievable method of making an engine behave as if it were two different mills. Those were the days.