Well, it seems that for every answer, I get 3 more questions.

I was out of ideas this morning and the car was still running poorly, so I swapped out the Mallory dual point for the stock unit. I dropped it in, set the timing, and went with it. It had fairly new points, condenser, cap, and rotor, so I didn’t even mess with it. I DID leave the Mallory coil on there.

I went out for lunch and the car is now running fine, although when I got home I had to bump the idle speed up, which was strange but seems to be the only side effect.

I guess I can’t complain, but I did several bench tests and I can’t figure out what’s actually wrong with the Mallory that was in there. I also see that the points are already showing wear, even though I put them in Sunday and ran the car for maybe 5 or 10 minutes and about 4 miles and the car was still running bad. I don’t really know if it’s normal to see slight wear on points after such short running, but I would think they would still look like new. Maybe the coil should have a resistor? I heard when I put it on the factory resistor wire would be good enough. Maybe I should use Mallory’s performance points, rather then their standard ones. But now I’m a little worried that the coil will burn up the single points in the stock distributor. Then I was thinking maybe the coil isn’t the problem, but maybe Mallory’s condenser (year old) is bad? But that is unlikely. Or maybe it’s just normal for the points to wear a little and I never noticed. They are obviously not worn enough to cause the poor running condition. So the actual problem hasn’t been isolated yet. I can’t find any short in it or anything.

Whew, I’m done for the day!