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Every motorcycle has to have a distributor, unless it's either so new that it has coil-on-plug like modern cars, or it's so old it uses magnetos, or it's a single-cylinder engine.



That's not true. As far back as the sixties at least, both Harleys, Triumphs and Japanese motorcycles had either one coil for each cylinder or one coil (with two plug wires) for every two cylinders. They weren't mounted on the plugs, but up under the gas tank or under the seat. The plug wires go directly from a coil to a spark plug, so there is no distributor.

The purpose of a distributor on a car was to distribute the output of one coil to several spark plugs. When you have a separate coil output for each plug, there's no need to distribute anything.




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