You'd be luckiest if it was in fact a dead short to ground, because its the intermittant shorts that kill your time diagnosing. Save all your fuses you bought and do your diagnosing this way- remove/disconnect the battery from the electrical system. Remove the fuse that keeps on blowing on you. For that fuse, in the fuse box where the fuse goes is the 2 sides of the fuse,,the 12 volt supply, and the protected circuit side of where the fuse goes. Get a multi meter from harbour freight for $5 , or anywhere else, hopefully it will have a diode/contintuity tester built into the ohm setting so you will hear a beeping buzzer sound when you touch the two meter leads together- that will read 0 ohms and it will beep indicating you have continuity- aka a complete circuit from one meter lead to the other. So take one of the MultiMeter wires and put it on the side of the fuse holder that goes to the circuit its protecting. Now the fun begins with the other MM lead- there's various ways to continue here. You can take the other lead and hook it up to the negative battery wire. In a perfect world, you would have a reading of OL (out of limits, aka more resistance than the meter can handle), which means you dont have an electrical connection (continuity) from the ground circuit to your powered circuit. Like I started off with, if you have a short, which you do, hope that you get a very low ohmic reading now/beeping meter when you do this because this is telling you your hot wire is in continuity with your ground wire. Leave the leads hooked up, hopefully your meter is beeping continuously now. Now you either zoom in on your suspected trouble spot and start moving the wire/ wiggling the wire harness in question. If the meter is beeping/reading near 0 ohms , you do have a short and your seeing it before you being verified without blowing fuses.
Now just hunt around until you move a wire and your beeping ohmmeter stops beeping- it'll probably go to OL when you find the problem and thus remove the hot wire from the ground its touching.
The danger of it all is that yea, now it seems like you have an instantanious dead short, but maybe while your moving wires around, you may make it more of an intermittant short- meaning you stopped the meter from beeping, but you dont know what fixed it or where it is. So go easy, dont go crazy on the wire harness, go from the fuse back in the circuit until you find the short. If you get a cheep meter that maybe doesnt have the continuity diode beeper,, then realize what you want to see here is OL, or the highest reading it goes to which is what you see when you turn it on and set it to read ohms and the leads arent touching. when you are testing the circuit you dont want it to read 0.X or 1 or 2 ohms- thats a short,,,meaning you have a complete electrical circuit from the 2 multimeter wires your using that happen to be hooked up to ground and power at the same time.
I would guess if you had a short to ground, you would see some "welding slag" -little debris like you get from a bad mig weld near the point of the short- so inscpect all grounds in the area for that clue, with some obvious discoloration.
What I just described is to find a shorted wire to a ground. Dealing with a bad electrical uniit like a coil/alternator is a little different but not much.
this will prevent you from using the blowing fuses technique of wiring diagnosis.
