I'm a believer in putting the Duraspark II trigger into a distributor and then building up the ignition from there. The triggers are pretty much "bullet proof" - and once that portion of the ignition is in place, many options are available. After the Load-O-Matic era there were two more versions of the Y points ignition distributor - the Autolite and the Motorcraft. Putting a Duraspark II armature / reluctor into the Autolite takes a machining operation - removal of the point cam for fitment of the reluctor - but once you have that part in hand ....... all of the rest can be built out of Ford parts (or items from the auto parts store. I believe the Motorcraft parts simply swap into place. I've attached the prints so you can see how it gets done on the Autolite. Once the reluctor mounting is in place, a late 70's trigger coil will generate the pulses needed for an electronic ignition controller - Ford or other. One of the best things about this - is the ability to mount the ignition controller wherever its cool and convenient - and not inside a hot, difficult to service at the side of the road distributor housing. The reluctor / armature unit in my Thunderbird has about 160,000 miles on it - it still makes a 1.0 V sine wave pulse just like it did in the F-150 it was originally installed in many years ago.
Once you have the trigger in place - a Duraspark II controller and coil will run the engine. It won't be a "melt the plugs" barn burner, it will basically provide the same dwell to the coil as the original Ford points did. If you provide it with the "white wire" of the OEM Ford wiring set-up, it will monitor the solenoid and auto-retard the spark by 10º to start the engine. Just don't mount the controller right next to a hot exhaust manifold or header pipe - some dufus engineer at Ford did this on many models of late 70's vehicles and it caused no end of destroyed electronic boxes and broken down vehicles. Cool and convenient is the way to wire this.
The fact is - GM used a "smarter" brain on the HEI. And you can adapt one to use the Ford trigger and a much hotter GM factory coil. Because you want to mount the HEI controller in a convenient cooler spot (on a heat sink), it will work much more reliably than where it goes in the HEI dizzy. These controllers use a Motorola operating scheme that will pump many Amps into a properly constructed low resistance, high temp coil - and you can get them at the autoparts store at a relatively low price.
Steve Metzger Tucson, Arizona