As for tuning: all As are pretty asthmatic if we're honest, so forced induction can find power by just making up for the poorer breathing as the revs increase: not giving the pistons any harder of a time than they had where the unblown engine made peak torque. The threat to them is piling more stress on them in that peak torque range. Turbos have the advantage over mechanically driven blowers with that, but good control of the ignition timing can be more important with either. If you're tech savvy & have access to the machining tools, you should consider putting together some programmable ignition system, like Sparkduino. There will be some cost, but once you have built it you'll have it to use on future projects, A Series or otherwise.
That makes sense, and is partly why Stuart recommended keeping the redline closer to ~5000 rpm.
The main reason I’ve been leaning away from a turbo setup is the added complexity. Adding a return line, blow-through carb setup, rising-rate FPR, etc. would mean a lot more time with the engine out sorting everything. In that regard, the suck-through supercharger setup, while a bit crude, has the advantage of being more of a “bolt-on” upgrade.
The Sparkduino idea is definitely interesting, but at the moment I’m leaning more towards the fully programmable 123+ distributor. I like that it still looks period-correct while offering a lot of tuning flexibility.
I may end up moving the timeline for this project forward slightly anyway. The heater valve blew on the motorway this morning and overheated the engine quite badly. Need to see if everything survived. Lesson learned about cheap reproduction parts...
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