I come to you once again in a time of great need. This morning, I took my license plate lights off to repaint them (previous owner sprayed them lime green?????) Anyways as I was putting them back on I obviously messed up somehow and it's blowing my illumination fuse whenever I put the lights on. Bless me with the knowledge to try to fix this, because electrical work is not my strong suit. Thanks yet again!

 

The only wiring close to the license plate are the license plate light bbs and housings. I would inspect the area to make sure you didn't pinch one or more of the wires for the license plate lights. Pinching the wiring will cause a short to ground and instantly blow the fuse.

 

Now what confuses me about that is I've since gone through and disconnected what I believe to be everything associated with that fuse, yet it's still blowing.

 

Take a multimeter and check each of those bulbs wire's resistance to ground.

 

I'm not sure I fully understand how to do this, so i might've done it completely wrong, but I'm not getting any readings. Wouldn't I need to have the lights on?

 

This test is to determine if you have a direct short. There are two wires, one 12V and the other a ground. When taking resistance reading it is done with power off. The 12V wire should show infinity (open to ground) and the ground wire should show zero (which would be good). If you get no reading on the ground wire then your ground is bad --- but that would not cause the fuse to blow.

 

Gotcha, thanks. I'm starting to believe something's grounding out in the fuse box itself, since it looks like my ac/radio fuse is also blowing.

 

The short is likely not in the fuse block but in a section of the wiring. You will have to get a wiring diagram and see what circuits each fuse powers and start tracing the wiring for shorts.

 

If the fuse did not blow before the restoration of the license lights, I'd go back to that and inspect everything. Last thing touched kind of troubleshooting.

 

Sorry guys, turns out I'm just stupid. Looks like all it was was the wire meant for the light in the automatic shifter was grounding out. I must've plugged that in to a nearby wire.
Thank you all for helping me try to figure this out!

 

Not to worry. This is a common thing folks do when they pop off the shifter surround. They see both plugs and think they go together.

 

You lucked out. That usually fries the dimmer control, not the fuse.

100% of the Series 3s I have had, had blown dimmers. Fortunately (?) the dark red gauges need all the brightness to be able to be visible at dusk, so it's no problem to just hardwire the dimmer control.