Moving the piston up is the same as decking the block... But you can only get a piston so close to the head. With steel rods, once you get to .040", you really need to be on your toes going any closer than that. Piston rock, or any kind of rod stretch and ruin our day.
If you look at my math from last night, a 25cc slug .040" from a 49cc head is 8.8:1. The only way to get 9:1 with a 25cc piston is to shave at least 3cc out of the heads and set the pistons at .040".
The other downside to running real thin headgaskets, decking hell out of the block, and/or shaving the heads is having to machine the intake manifold (and having to get custom pushrods).
That's one of the cool things about this project I'm working on. With minimal decking and other metal removal it saves you from having to machine the deck, heads, and manifold to raise VE. Plus, if you have a block that's not gouged, it can go straight into the honing machine instead of having to pay to bore it and then honing it to size. (not to mention leaving more meat on the cylinder walls).
The pistons I ordered for my 454 jetboat engine will be here tomorrow and that's how I did it. I stuck the block in a square decking fixture (that I made
) and decked it until the lowest corner came clean and then stopped. Then I honed the worst hole till it was clean and made the other seven match. I knew I wanted my pistons .020" in the hole so I set the CH for that and got the OD at 4.256 so I'd have 4thou on my .010"over block.
If I had to pay for machining and was on a budget, I could have paid to have it honed and measure the existing deck heaight. Then ordered pistons for .020" in the hole/010 over. Saving the bore job money and the decking operation would almost offset the cost of the pistons. Plus this route leaves the deck thicker and the cylinder walls thicker. It's a win win