First of all, I've been lurking here for a while and have greatly appreciated the information and advice on this site.

I just recently purchased a 99 Mustang V6 3.8 and it's been awesome. However, there was an issue with the brakes in that I had to push really hard to activate the shift disengage and turn on the brake lights. I took it to a shop and they side the wires were burned through. I try and leave and it won't disengage at all. I look at the brake switch and one wire is not connected, so I connected it and it was fixed completely. The switch activated at normal pressure. Everything was fine.... for a while.

The switch kept acting all finicky every so often, and I would have to jiggle the switch for it to work. Yesterday, it gave out entirely and I've had to rely on the manual override to shift out of park, but that also means I'm driving without brake lights (not good). Here are the steps I've taken to troubleshoot:

1: Fuses are fine (fuse 17 and 35 according to the manual).

2: I'm ordered a new brake switch from kragen and they'll get it Monday.

3: I measure the voltage with respect to ground and on fuse 17, I get 12V from both sides.

4: I only get about 100mV on fuse 35.

Now I don't have the wiring diagram, but am I correct to assume that there should be a 12V potential difference between the two brake switch wires at all times? If so, I'm not getting it.

I also noticed that the wires were burned a bit, so I restripped and recrimped them. I'm afraid that the wires might be burned up between the switch and fuse panel. I checked the resistance between the fuse panel and brake switch and got anywhere from 30-60 k-ohms.

Any help would be appreciated!