Just to bring this to a close. I ordered a rebuilt 44D4 from the Distributor Doctor, sent him some cash. He said 5 to 7 days, which I thought was quite good (I assumed working days). Well it turned up on Monday (6 days after I sent the money) so impressed with the speed.
Nicely packaged and looks literally like new - as a lot of it actually is. Came complete with points and condenser (no rotor arm or cap as he didn't have any decent ones in stock). Nice clean oil pads ready oiled with nice clean oil.
Fitted it today. End result one happy chappy. No more timing jitter. Much smoother idle. Set at 12 deg static advance at the moment but I will advance it some more until I can detect some pinking.
Took it for a quick spin and it feels more lively (almost certainly my brain is telling me it must be better because I spent a lot of cash on it) and certainly revs more cleanly. It was also much, much easier to set the carb mixture - it was pretty much OK but with the old distributor it was hard to tell as the idle was so lumpy.
Also discovered I have a 12V non ballasted coil and no sign of the "6v" ballasted feed. It starts OK in the cold anyway so will leave as is for the moment unless I come across the wire somewhere.
A slight aside. The old distributor was fitted with the Lumenition Magnecore module and I think I have read on here somewhere comments about the disc making the rotor arm sit too high. Well when I cleaned up the distributor cap you could see where a rotor arm had carved away at the contacts where it was sitting too high. Probably need to look out for a decent new old stock Lucas cap and spare rotor arm. I am going to stick with points in the new distributor.
All in all thumbs up for the Distributor Doctor, a lot of money but worth it.
Roger
Attached a couple of pics of the nice shiny thing.
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