String Trimmer electrical puzzle

Pull starter rope broke on the Craftsman string trimmer. Took it apart, turned out to be an easy fix to replace the rope. But, there is a rocker type kill switch on the housing, and when I pulled out the spade lugs on the contacts so I could remove the housing, one of the contacts on the switch came off. Well, of course nobody has one locally that I can find, and it is a special order from Sears and they don't have any in stock at the warehouse, so who knows how long it will take. So I removed the wires from the coil and the ground and installed some 18 gauge igition wire, about a foot long, so I could run it outside the housing and install a toggle switch to get me by for now. Pretty simple fix, except that now there is no spark at all. I have good continuity between the coil and the ground. And yes, I've tried it with the toggle switch in both positions. I can't believe that the spark plug just happened to fail at the same time. The gap between the coil and the flywheel appears to be fixed, so I don't believe that it changed when I removed the mounting screw to replace the ground wire - and I didn't touch the other mounting screw at all. What am I missing?

A goat to eat the weeds!

Try another switch. Is this a true kill switch that one wire goes to ground? If not and it is simply an ignition switch, possibly it has too much internal resistance. I have hooked up toggle switches to ground(kill sw)and when turned off they would not stop. Hope this helps.

Take the switch out, tape the wire and try it. If it works, run it till it is out of fuel or dies. Then you know it was your switch/connections issue. Jim

I think most of 'em simply ground out the ignition coil to shut it down. As already said, run it without the switch (wires separated and taped) and you can always use the choke to shut it down.