Taurus Cruise Control Failure

The cruise control on my 95 Taurus (3.0L, 140k miles) recently quit working. I have a factory manual for it so I followed the troubleshooting flow chart and determined that the rotating contact in the steering wheel had an open circuit. After removing this device I noticed that the blue wire had snapped off even with the junction right where the wire goes into the contact. It looked like the wire was very brittle at this junction for some reason. To repair it I soldered a short jumper lead over where the break was. Another (purple) wire was half broken off so I did this one too the same way. Put it all back together and the cruise control worked fine (getting power works wonders)!

I hope someone will find these observations helpful.

Thank you for posting what it took to fix your cruise! It's always great to see helpful members posting unsolicited fixes!

-Rod