Sorting out the ignition

This blimin' ignition is trying me.  I seem to have heaps of information on all the variations of manurhin electrics, and yet so little on what my own should look like (all electrical wires and components had been stripped off my bike before I bought it)

After comparing schematics, reading various magazine articles (kindly sought out for me by fellow Manurhin owners) and deducing what I could of the windings on my magneto stator, I eventually came to the conclusion that my bike was designed to have an ignition coil.  With the help of a fellow Manurhin owner, we found a French supplier of ignition coils as designed for the Manurhin, but after a few further enquiries, it appears that any old single cylinder 12v coil would do the job, so I popped over to Vale Onslow to buy one.  While there I asked them about condensors and stator windings - I'd read a lot about them on forums, but I was keen to hear what the experts thought.  After lots of sucking-through-teeth and general mockery for it not being off a proper motorbike, the general expert opinion was "just try it and see if it works"

So armed with a new 12v coil I set off home to "just try it".  The circuit is pretty simple so there's not much to experiment with or get wrong.... so why did everything seem to be shorting to earth?

I come from the school of "if it aint broke, dont fix it", and so to this point I hadn't bothered to do anything with the breaker points other than clean the contacts - How foolish can I be?  You'd have thought by now that I'd have learnt my lesson;  Everything on this scooter is broken!
It wasn't until I had completely stripped the points down to the tiddliest of fiddly bit that I discovered that someone else at sometime in the past (presumably just after the last time it had run) had also stripped the points.... but reassembled them incorrectly.  By simply getting a steel washer and an insulating washer in the wrong order, the whole unit was earthed and rendered useless.

Setting the points is dead easy - although the owners handbook does give a gap size (.016-.02 in) they helpfully also suggest "the thickness of a postcard" - so thats what I set them to.
More tricky was trying to work out where best to position the advance/retard - I reckoned a good guess would be 'in the middle'