Pertronix has a similarly dodgy rep in the vintage motorcycle world. They have been abandoned long since in favor of several other kits for Norton, Triumph, BSA, et al. (Boyer, Britespark and others) Unfortunately, the world of kits for Stovebolts is limited as you all know. Langdon's HEI kit sounds like a winner but it came along after I'd come up with my solution. I don't know if he's still selling it.
My solution about 20 years ago was MSD, which is a capacative discharge unit triggered by whatever you can come up with. I used the original points less the condenser as a trigger. Do NOT get across the secondary voltage. There is enough energy to kill.
In an abundance of caution I kept the condenser in place and tucked the wire out of the way. I keep the original coil-to-distributor wire in the glove box and a spare set of NOS points in there too. In the last 100,000 miles I've not had to use either backup; NO Failures. That said, if I let the truck sit in rainy Seattle for a couple of months, I have to pop the dizzy cap off (a black one) and dress the points with a few strokes of a point file to clean off the oxide.
I keep good spark plugs set to about 0.040" to save the wires from high voltage breakdown. MSD recommends 0.060" but that runs the secondary voltage up too high, I think. One can only get 7mm wire for these not 8mm. In 20 years use, I've replaced two sets of wires, several caps and rotors, more spark plugs than I can remember but probably a couple dozen. And I've replaced the points once when I forgot to grease the cam.
The MSD unit was expensive then and probably more so now but you get what you pay for in this case.
