About 10 years ago, give or take a couple months, I brought the 93 Explorer into a dealer to change the synchros in the tranny - real tough to shift. They get the job done and tell me come get it. It sounded a little wierd on the way home and 1/2 way there it started bucking real bad on the freeway...finally limp it home. Trailered it back to dealership next morning...oops, they never put the oil back in it.

So they got to go order avery single part, including the aluminum casing, and build me a new tranny since Ford doesn't stock complete units. OK, got it back, with oil this time......

Flash forward to last month....100K miles later this "new" transmission breaks 2nd gear. Ok time to drop it...replaced with rebuilt unit.

But something goofy's going on with the nuetral safety switch and back-up switch wires/connectors. Since the new tranny has no nuetral switch, I'll just solder those leads tobether and be done with that. But now the back up lights are on all the time?

The idiot dealer switched the connectors between the two. So everytime it was in nuetral, the back-up lights went on. And it would only show nuetral when it was in reverse - no wonder I was always getting a 522 code on KOEO test.

I just fixed it yesterday. What happened from what I can tell is that with no oil in the tranny 10 years ago, the tranny got so hot that it melted all the plastic insulation of the wires - burned it right out of the connectors. I could see where one of the wires was still charred black. So the goofballs 1/2 way dissassmbled the connectors but not to remove the pins from them completely. Then they wrapped the copper with black electrical tape and reassembled it. Crimped the connectors back on but to the wrong two wires. The Chilton's manual confirmed all this by the wire colors.

Back together now the right way and now I have back-up lights again after 10 years of not. Guess I really didn't need them anyway...10 years and I never noticed this?