Supply & demand? I'd think there were at least as many 1275's to be had out of Metros etc. They won't have been as knackered as anything in Minis that limped on well past their natural age & if you found one it promised added oomph straight from scrapyard.
1275's are basically little A's that were stretched & squeezed in various spots on the draughtboard to find the extra cc's. 998's etc are less compromised in some fundamental places.
OK, so for you guys, I'll just say then a higher demand. For us out here in the colonies, 1275's of any description had for a good many years, been rather thin on the ground, until about 2000-ish when a few small start up firms bought up Engines and front cuts. Since then until about 2 - 3 years ago, they were considerable easier to com by. Now, one may come up for sale somewhere on the island about once or twice a month at most.
Small bore engines are fine, they go well and cruise well and when properly tuned and setup will give similar performance to a 1275.
BUT you cannot beat the smile factor of seriously putting the boot into a 1275.
I totally agree, the project on the go at the moment is a 1380 16v job for my mk1, I had the block,crank and rods etc laying about, but if you had to buy a base unit then costs will be even more.
For the cost of the base unit you can no doubt pay for all the machining work ie re-bore crank grind etc and be half way though buying the new parts for the 998 plus those little engines run so sweet once set up properly
Shooter
And therein is the rub with costs. If one were to buy a donor engine and then overhaul it back to standard, then the 998's would of course be considerably cheaper, however if you wanted to modify your 998 to more or less equal in output (kinda) the standard or even very mildly modified 1275, it may well be a dearer way to go. I think we'd all agree one key item a 998 needs at a very early stage of tuning (like the first item) is a decent head. I'm not up to speed with the most current prices however last time I looked, roughly buying the donor 998 engine and then have the head modified or obtaining one off the shelf, that then puts one in the ball park or past that of buying a donor 1275 engine. Unless injected, while the peak power outputs can be matched or indeed surpassed with a small bore engine, the shape of the power curve, particularly in the smaller capacities, isn't nearly the same and so become less friendly to drive for say the missus and they are inevitably noisier as they need to be reved harder. Just reading back over that, I think I've become a cranky old bastard !
There's pros and cons both ways I guess. I had tinkered with the small bore engines for myself long ago, souping them up, getting them to rev (meaningfully) to 8000 and a bit past that and pull like the proverbial train, it was some fun and I leaned a lot there, but about 20-ish years back, I was well over them too and while I had 1275's (always have had) I decided for my own stuff, that was all I was going to have. I'm finding too, that unquestionably, the 1275's have a better life expectancy.
