[demas]

Work has been busy but the main crux to progress has been the shift boot. Believe it or not, it's damn near impossible to find a right hand drive shift boot replacement.

The original leather boot doesn't have enough material to make the 'crater' fold butt up against the new ZHP knob and left too much of a gap. Since I want to leave the original unit in tact needed something with a second plastic frame. Literally crawled all the usual places - no dice. Ended up purchasing a generic faux leather shift boot with enough length to wrap around the half circle shape of the mounting frame (most generic ones aren't long enough so this one took some time to find as well). Next, I stumbled on a RHD E82 boot on like page 26 of the Amazon search. So ordered that too - but took 2 weeks to deliver.

Here are all three. 2nd and 3rd pictures show the generic boot that includes a plastic ring which I though I could transfer over to the new replacement boot.


Finally tonight I had a chance to pop in the replacement shift boot with plastic frame into the car and even without the plastic ring, sits nicely with the ZHP knob nearly fully seated in the shifter stalk.


I did a crude 'crater' style fold over and I have to say, it's not bad. Given my incredible OCD I'm still contemplating whether to go with the crater fold and call it a day or try to feed the leather into the ZHP knob. Here are pictures with the crater style inward fold going from N, R, 1~6th gears.




Lots of pictures. If you are on dial-up 1) apologies in advance 2) upgrade your connection.. :-)




What do you think? It's not bad - can you live with something like this? I want to be comfortable before I hammer the knob down hopefully once and for all..