Variants, Options and Custom Fields - Possible?

I have been reading that its not possible to have a huge amount of variants per product which leaves me in a dilemma on the best way to achieve what I need.

I have products which comes with the following options

"Colour/Finish" with varying Prices
"Size" with the options having different prices
"Type of Mechanisim"
"Colour of Cloth" no difference in pricing

Now im presuming the colour of cloth can/should be a custom item field with the options. The rest im assuming should be variants, but the colour finish has around 11 options, size around 3-5 and type another 3, so this would create quite a lot of variants.

Is there a way round this - I guess an alternative would be to create seperate products for the size - but would prefer to not have to do this.

If anyone has any ideas on how I should approach this I would be most grateful.

Thanks

Dave

"Type of Mechanisim"/"Colour of Cloth" should indeed be custom fields of the table "item".
For Colour and Size, you might be able to do it with options instead of characteristics ? Maybe one ? It depends on our your pricing is done actually.
Options add their price to the base price of the product/variant while the variants replace the price of the product.
two characteristics is possible, but that mean that you need to set the price for each combination of the characteristics so 11*5. That might not be practical for you...

Thank You Nicolas,

At least I have a better idea on how to move forward on this.

Thanks once again

Dave