618 grasshopper blowing reg. fuse

[grasshopper46923]

My 618 grasshopper keeps blowing voltage regulator fuse. If I unplug the regulator wires the fuse will not blow but within a couple seconds of plugging it back in it will blow. I thought regulator had to be bad so I replaced and it is still doing the sane thing.Going nuts here trying to figure this out.....any idea? Thank you in advance!

 

[mechanic mark]

The Mower Shop, Inc. - Grasshopper Mowers Parts Diagrams, Front Mount 618 Click on year and scroll down for wiring schematic. Hands on, inspect all wiring and connections for being tight and secure. Look for bare wires, burn marks, corrosion, rust, everything electrical, take your time doing this, trace wires from fuse that keeps blowing & let us know how it goes.

Fixing Electric Clutches When you installed new PTO clutch did you adjust air gap to specs. as well as burnish new clutch?

 

[grasshopper46923]

The Mower Shop, Inc. - Grasshopper Mowers Parts Diagrams, Front Mount 618 Click on year and scroll down for wiring schematic. Hands on, inspect all wiring and connections for being tight and secure. Look for bare wires, burn marks, corrosion, rust, everything electrical, take your time doing this, trace wires from fuse that keeps blowing & let us know how it goes.

Spent several hours tracing wires and checking for nicks in wires....bare spots....loose connections etc. Found one plug that looked like it had been hot and cut plug off and spliced wires together with crimp style connectors. I went as far as taking all the wires out or the wiring harness to inspect and found nothing . The wires that comes out of the fuse block that the voltage regulator is on one goes to the key switch and one to the voltage regulator plug and If I am remembering correctly the other went to the starter solenoid.But following those wires down all seemed good. Could it possibly be something in the circuit board panel near the fuse block? It just acts like a dead short somewhere because the fuse blows so fast and sparks fly from it when it does. Also I will add the same time this all happened I just changed my pto clutch because I was mowing along and my mower clutch just shut off turning my deck off. Now I am wondering if the clutch was really bad or not because shortly after that I was mowing and the motor just shut down because battery was drained. That's when I got checking and found U had a blown voltage regulator fuse....which makes me wonder if I just didn't have enough electrical power to operate my pto clutch making me think it had went bad. Oh....and it also had blown the fuse to the pto and every time I replaced it with the old clutch engaged it would blow that fuse again. Then when I unplugged the plug at the clutch and then engaged the switch it would not blow the fuse and immediately would blow when I plugged the clutch back in. So that's why I thought the pto clutch was bad. After putting on the new clutch it did take care of that but then I started having the issue with the voltage regulator fuse at the exact time that the clutch issue was fixed. Long story but maybe this will give someone an idea to what is going on with this dang thing. Thanks for the help so far.