red coil

just curious what you need to make them work. i was cleaning up the garage yesterday after i had pulled the engine and set up the bigger cooler and a sump. and i have also cleaned up the tinware a bit. new seals and so on. so i stumble on a red coil i got a while back, but it was broken. the terminal was broken of and the wire inside snapped. so i tossed it in the bin. but i always wanted to run a red coil because dave rhoads has one in his car... but i looked it up yesterday and it seems like it can't be run on a distributor with points and it needs a resistor to use it. who else runs this and can help me getting some more information about it?

thanks