Probably not an advantage. At least I wouldn't think so. Probably only a matter of price and how much you might want to DIY and that depends entirely on your point of view. The one that is already machined to fit the 235/261 would essentially be the same distributor. There is no difference I can see at all. What both of us had to do was pretty simple...remove the flange, reduce the shaft size and then add a collar to keep the gear in the right place where it meshes with the cam gear. Their retaining collar is slightly more spiffy...I ended up using a retaining piece made for a generic GM engine (like the 230/250/283/327, etc)...any distributor that relied on a flange. I got one on Amazon and it was less than $7. Speedway has one made for the 235/261:
https://tinyurl.com/wpk85jje The price of the distributor itself has declined since I did this...I believe on the large auction site a bit less than $70 plus tax for one of the 230/250 distributors will make it yours and I think I paid $10 for 2 of the collar pieces I used on Amazon. So that's the money part of the deal.
I just did this because in the months preceding my work this topic had come up a few times, Tom Langdon has stopped making his mini-HEI distributors and from what I could tell people wanted a new product that used GM parts if they were needed. I just wanted to show how I converted the one I'm using. I still have Tom's mini-HEI, but something went wrong in there. Some new parts are needed and so I went back to using the old imported one. Tom and I discussed this, by the way...a few times. He didn't replace parts if they weren't missing or damaged or showed some sign of trouble (except for the rotor as I recall). And Tom is a very intelligent guy. I suspect something in the mini-HEI just stopped working. The key thing to keep in mind is any of the products you get from Rock Auto or any other re-seller of old GM distributors isn't going to be new. As I said, the comments around here at the time I did this indicated to me people were looking for something brand new.
