What an odyssey this has been.

To restate my problem: I was desirous of replacing the portion of the transmission wiring harness that connects the transmission range sensor, transmission connector, output shaft speed sensor, and vehicle speed sensor. The original harness' wiring had become cracked and brittle due to heat and age.

After hours of searching on the web, I began to believe that my wiring harness was an anomaly: none of the other mid-1990s Ford harnesses had connectors that looked like mine. (See the photos attached to my first post.)

Crestfallen that I was unable to find a simple replacement, penury dictated that I put my mind toward fabricating a replacement.

As I said in an earlier post, I ordered from eBay a Mark VIII wiring harness. While the shapes of the transmission-facing connectors were identical to mine, the color coding of the Mark VIII harness' wires differed from the wires going to my Cougar's PCM.

Perhaps lack of information was the most fatiguing aspect of this debacle. I have the 1996-1999 Ford OEM shop manual CDROM that's floating around Bittorrent. However the wire color coding for the Cougar and Thunderbird from 1996 is, apparently, different from the 1995. I was unable to locate service information online for 1995 Ford cars.

I was in the depths of dispair when I recalled the exitence of Alldata. Alldata completely saved me. Alldata had very good wiring diagrams for 1995. For $20 USD, I subscribed to Alldata for one car for one month.

The value of Alldata was showing what pins on the connectors connected to which circuit / pin on the PCM. Having lost confidence in my ability to "translate" the Mark VIII wiring to the Cougar wiring, I patiently used a multimeter to map which connector wire runs to which pin on the connector that leads to the PCM.

I happy to report that my Cougar is now moving under its own power.

Incidentially, my 1995 factory wiring harness is rare but not aftermarket. I found a reference to it on tbscshop.com, but it was sold out. At the risk of a reprimand for distributing others' intellectual property, I'm attaching Tbscshop's image.

Executive summary:
To replace a the transmission wiring harness on 1995 ( & 1994?) Cougars / Thunderbirds you can use a Mark VIII harness from various years, but you'll have to cut out the connector under the radio and splice the wires to Ford WPT-326 and WPT-473 connectors. Also you'll have to manually trace the wires to connect the correct connector pin to the correct PCM lead.

 

Don, please update this post once you get this figured out.

Thanks
Tim

 

I've purchased a used item from eBay an item entitled, "1993 1994 1995 Lincoln Mark VIII Transmission Harness."

We'll see if it fits.