More yet, H questions

I got a pic sent to me of a H distributor with a coil on top of it. The one I bought for my boy, has had a alternator stuck on it, AND no coil on it. WHY? I have no fire in the spark plug wires. Am I missing the coil, do I need a coil with an alt. Im not doing much work, choosing to let my boy do most of it,

Having an alternator wont have anything to do with a coil one way or another.

If your tractor is missing a coil, then it sounds like you will need to go get one before you have fire at the plugs.

If the tractor has a distributor it needs a coil. Make sure you don't have a magneto instead though. If it has the original on off switch there will only be one terminal for a wire on the back, unless you have a real early mag that a cable shut of. Distributor ignition uses a 2 wire switch.

It's all electrical, but you're talking about two different systems.

With a coil ignition, you need a battery and something to keep it charged, which could be either a genrator, usually 6V, or an alternator in the case of 12V. The ignition system relies on getting power to the coil from the tractor's electrical system.

With a magneto ignition you do not need a battery or anything to charge it to make it run. It's self-contained. Magneto tractors frequently do have batteries and generators or alternators, but those are there only for operating things like electric starters and light. The presence of battery and charging system has no effect whatever on a magneto igntion.

So having an alternator doesn't mean you should have a coil ignition. That's not to say that it's possible you have a coil-tye ignition and the coil is missing.

I apologize for not recalling your past posts, so I have no sense of your experience for what you're attempting just now, so if some of this seems too basic, it's not meant as an insult.

You may not have a coil because you have a magneto. In that case there's one set of ideas for solving the no-spark problem.

If you've got a coil and distributor, that's another set of solutions (with a little overlap).

Look back at the pictures Steve sent a few days ago. If what you have looks like the lower picture, with a round cap with room for five wires and a domed but rectangular cap on top with one wire, then you have a magneto.

If it does not look like that and looks more like the upper picture without the coil, you may simply be lacking the coil, the addition of which would be a good first step to getting a spark, but there likely will be other things to check and replace (points, condenser, plug wires and maybe some wiring on the tractor -- if the coil's gone, who knows what's left), all manageable.

Figure out which you have, and let us know and we can go from there.
Steves pics