I recently bought a road going 2a out in Costa Rica it ran, but badly. The plan is a full strip down and I'm comfortable with bigger mechanical things and thought I'd have time to get into the electrics but for various reasons it'd be good to have the car running for a little while. So I started looking into the problem. There was a lot of play in the aftermarket distributor shaft. So I had a friend bring a new Lucas 45 out.
Yesterday I moved the LR (it was working) to the car port and changed the distributor. It wouldn't start nor fire on a various test plugs with the new one fitted. At this point there were 4ohms across the primary winding on the aftermarket coil and the secondary resistance was in the general range though I don't remember exactly (maybe 6K ohms).
I put the old aftermarket distributor back in and it fired up. So the problem was clearly the new distributor. I re fitted the new Lucas and checked the points gap. Still no spark so I left it and did a bit more reading.

This morning I saw the points were not perfectly flat. I'll attach a photo, there's wet n dry behind for contrast. I rubbed them a little with contact cleaner and 1200 wet n dry. The surface was fairly crumbly.

I was investigating with a multimeter and had the ignition key turned on at one point when I started to smell something electrical getting hot . One of the condenser wires was cooking. Does this suggest the condenser was faulty, possibly shorting?

I had read you could remove the condenser. So I did and tried again to see if there was a spark. I was not expecting it to run it was just for a test. I still got nothing.

I continued poking around and realised the coil was now dead. I now get 0 Ohms across the primary winding. Is this more likely to be due to the same issue as the condenser or from turning the engine over?

I’m planning to replace the coil, points and condenser. Hopefully there are supplies here. Is there a good chance this will solve the issue or is there something I’m missing?

Thanks for any “point-ers”!

It sounds like the ignition wiring was wrong. Are you sure the wires to and from the coil were the right way round and the wire to the points was in the right place and the little insulating washer was fitted?

Col

Points fitted wrong and shorting out,

Dead short somewhere for that to happen.

Or a knackered coil

It sounds like you have a shorted condenser and that has fried the coil.
When you say "new Lucas 45" do you mean a genuine Lucas part or one of the many copies? A while back I got a copy 45D4 as a spare, then some months later I had points problems and thought I'd use the points and condenser from the spare 45D4. But both the points and condenser were such poor quality that they failed within a few days (overheated, then shorted). I ended up converting to electronic ignition, which was a big improvement.