[HDowse]

A good friend of mine has had a 1937 pickup in his family since 1937. He'd had intermittent running problems for several years. The truck would start up, go for several miles and then just quit. The firewall coil resistor had to be replaced but the problem persisted. I'm caretaking the truck now that he is in senior living and today we went to get some lumber and after dropping him off I returned home only to find the same problem: no start after a momentary shut down. Since the owner had sent along numerous parts with the truck, i located a spare distributor with coil and condenser attached and decided to exchange the coil/condenser. When I removed the coil, the condenser bracket stayed with the distributor mounting bolt. The solder holding the bracket on had let go.
Most of the time the bracket was in enough contact with the bracket to complete the circuit but once in a while the resistance between the unsoldered bracket and coil was too much and the circuit failed.
Here's a picture of the condenser. I thought others would want to know that these can fail and as many have said on the 'Barn, look for the easy stuff first.