If you are talking about taking the clamp and unscrewing the head to expose the copper pickup, yes it might work if the signal is strong enough. It may not be though, just depends on how close you can get to the coil windings or the path from the coil to the center button.
There is some silicone dielectric grease in the pickup. Ideally you want to retain it and if you use it like this you will probably lose a bit of it.
So what you are saying is that there is no way to get an ignition wave form out of a cic with the equipment I have?
Outside of the method you mentioned above there are other ways. If you were to stick a piece of aluminum tape to the dist cap over the coil or the path from the coil to the center button, then jumper it to the lead, you may get a usable pattern. The metal tape acts like a pickup. We actually used that method with the old Sun Machine line of testers instead of attempting to make a specific pickup for every different dist cap being produced.
This method is very similar to using the flag pickup you mentioned.
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