The Valiant has been sitting for almost a year. When I break the points I get a blue but extremely tiny spark.

What goes bad just sitting there? Condenser? Coil? Long term memory?

RK

errrmmm... I forget.

Seriously, though. Test the coil.

Electrolytic capacitors (such as your condenser) actually can go bad from lack of use. It's difficult to test it well, but cheap and easy to swap out. If you remove it entirely and the spark looks normal, then that's the culprit. I would expect it to be much more likely to go bad from sitting around than a canister coil *unless* the coil is sideways or nose-down; then fluid can leak out of it leading to internal arcing. I've seen both.

As my rule of thumb, if you've got ~1,000,000,000 sparks out of your coil, it's a good time to replace it.