I plan to try a good long piston soak after our current trip. What's a good vac product for pulling the soak liquid? (No, I don't relish mouth-vacuum for pulling that stuff... and yes I'm assuming my rings are clogged enough that the solvent will NOT soak past at least the first round or two...)
How crucial to get it 100% empty/dry? This is the one thing that makes me nervous, due to incompressibility of liquid
Hmm, it's a 1.8 L engine, so 450 mL per cylinder, with a 13:1 expansion ratio, so I guess you've got about 34 mL combustion chamber volume at the top of the stroke. I think you'd want to make sure you've left substantially less liquid than that in there, and it should be fine. You could always make sure you can turn the crank over two times gently with a wrench. You'll feel compression happening, but it shouldn't ever feel really hard. Then you can dare to let it crank under its own power.
Why don't you just use Valvoline's special oil, blue restore? It's designed to free sticky rings. It was originally made for use in Cummins diesel engines (OEM) that have sticky rings issues. It's kinda spendy but beats changing out a set of rings. There are postings here on PC about it.