I have a weird one. Not every time, but sometimes when I stop to park, I put the vehicle in park and take my foot off the brake, vehicle still idling. I then engage the (foot operated) emergency brake and the engine goes dead. I have had this happen several times, so I am pretty sure it isn't a fluke. I for the life of me can not see what the emergency brake has to do with the engine running. The only correlation I can see is that the brake light comes on when you engage it or maybe there is some sort of pressure feed from the rear brakes to the master cylinder when engaged, but that doesn't seem plausible to me. Any ideas?

1990 F150 4x4
AOD transmission (not electronic)
302

 

The e-brake is nothing more than a set of cables that run from the pedal to the rear drums. My guess is that you have a short somewhere and engaging the e-brake moves something enough to cause the short.

 

As Andy said, the E-brake is purely mechanical and has no contact with the engine.

I would crawl under and check along teh E-brake cable and see if it is contacting anything else.

Also check the engine for codes, may be an idle control problem. Desn't hurt to check.

 

Make sure the pedal arm itself isn't contacting anything down on the floor near the firewall.

 

I was getting a TPS sensor circuit failure. So I started testing the wires to the sensor and found out that where the wire goes into the computer harness was loose. I pushed the connector on into the harness connector and heard a snap. Voila, problem solved. I am guessing pushing the E-brake was flexing the firewall near the computer and harness and it was shifting the loose wire so it would lose connection. It was also getting very poor fuel mileage and loss of power when the TPS wasn't making good connection.