Don, if you pull the coil wire off the cap and turn the motor over while holding the wire close to ground, does it spark?
It will not throw a spark but will wake me up. See bullet 6 in my initial post.
As far as the points go.. I'm sure that they have overheated as indicated by the discoloration of the active side contact arm. Doing this troubleshooting tonight I decided to file the points and regap as a prelude to buying new ones tomorrow. They actually look good now and do function properly.
One interesting thing and it's something I'll check again tomorrow (today actually) is the secondary high tension lead from coil to distributor tower. Although I tried three different wires, including the one installed when the engine died, none of them show continuity when using a digital ohm meter. I say no continuity but it was actually something like 4 meg-ohms. I'll look into that when I get up later this morning. This sounds weird but will check with analog meter tomorrow.
This isn't rocket science and shouldn't be all that difficult to diagnose. Just a little memory cell realignment going on as it's been a few years since I've tuned and timed an engine.
Later,
Don
