Thanks Bob...and also thanks to Gord and Bob for the links to those articles. It was especially interesting to see that fellow had a way to hook up a distributor and an oscilloscope, wasn't it? Yes, the C in the RC time constant is the capacitance and as Jerry pointed out we might have a bit of work measuring the R value.
As for the HEI, since that's a point-free (notice I didn't say pointless) distributor, a condenser wouldn't be needed for the same purpose. However there was a condenser in the early HEI distributors and it looked like the typical one in the points distributor. I want to say it was used to help control radio interference.
My thought is that there is room to mount the capacitor in the stock 235 distributor and doing so would not be difficult. One lead would attach to the mounting tab and become connected to the breaker plate (ground) and the other would be connected to an insulated wire which would attach exactly as the original condenser mounted. I think it should help points last longer and do a more accurate job. The next time I have to order anything from Mouser, I'll include a few of these in the order and modify them as needed. Maybe then someone here can give it a try. Personally I'm using one of Tom Langdon's mini-HEI distributors and it is working great. Now that we're back, I'm going to see if I still have an old points distributor here so I can see how it would fit.
I will tell you this: if you ever have to replace an ignition module (especially in a Ford product), use acetone to clean the mounting surface really well and get some extra thermal grease to mount it. A couple of months ago I replaced one in a friend's Ford over in NM. He mentioned they were going bad about every 10 days to a couple of weeks and he couldn't figure out why. Turned out somebody had left a horizontal ridge of dried thermal grease about 1mm thick when the first module failed and the new modules (apparently a bit wider than the original one and made in...you guessed it...China) sat on top of that ridge...meaning they were not making full contact with the heat sink and would burn out pretty predictably. We were there last week and I noticed his Ford is still running fine.
