[Tony Wheeler]

Well, I must confess I'm astounded by this news. In all my life I've never encountered broken points springs until now. For 30 years I drove around happily on points, in BMC 4-cyl motors, Holden red and grey motors, Leyland P76 V8 motors, a Valiant slant 6 motor, and in all those hundreds of thousands of miles, many of them off the beaten track in the Australian outback, it never once occurred to me I should carry spare points! Nor did I ever see broken points springs on any other motor I worked on, including in numerous servos, a Mazda dealership, a Renault/Peugeot dealership, nor any of the numerous vehicle makes my friends drove over the years.

With all these broken flathead points springs in Australia I can only assume we received dodgy English replacement parts after the war. I find it impossible to believe the original flathead points failed during the war, and if they'd failed at the rate we're seeing in this thread, the Allies would have lost the war!

The pommie NOS replacement points which failed on me last week cost around $30 from memory. I notice Macs list two different repro sets, a US made set for $28 and a foreign made set for $20. I bought a set from the Australian distributor recently and they cost $42 with the mark up. I don't know if they were US or foreign made. I bought a condenser last week for $14, which Macs list for $8, and being mistrustful of non-genuine parts I put the meter on it when I got home. Sure enough it was faulty and immediately became airborne. It took me less than a millisecond to dismiss the idea of returning it and trying to explain to the counter lady how a capacitor works and demonstrate with my test meter why this one was faulty. I then tested the 8BA condenser I bought a while back and haven't yet fitted. Fortunately for my state of mind it wasn't faulty.

Quite apart from being pissed of at wasting $30 on crap pommie points and $14 on a junk Chinese condenser, and having my vehicle break down on me, and having to crawl around under it on wet grass with a crook back to remove the distributor, thereby losing the precise ignition timing I spent several hours setting up, I've now lost all faith in reproduction and replacement flathead points and condensers. I vow and declare I'll never waste another red cent on them as long as I draw breath. I consider myself fortunate the points failed at home and not out on the road.

I've now ordered three Pertronix kits from the US for a total of $420 including postage. That's $140 each, compared to $56 for points and condenser, or close to $70 with postage, unless I drive 100 km to pick them up. In other words, break even occurs at the first change of points. Plus I get a free distributor shaft bushing, list price $3.55 at Macs! Of course, if I get a 2% improvement in fuel efficiency it will pay for itself in 5000 km!

However, there's one thing you can't put a price on, and that's never having to crawl under a blitz and pull the distributor off to adjust the points or re-time the motor.