If your older BMW is anything like ours, the shift boot has probably seen better days. Over the years, in the hot sun, the leather dries out and starts to shrink. This causes cracking and the leather ends up pulling away from the plastic boot ring.
Manual shift boots are a very simple idea but serve both functional and aesthetic purposes.
Functional:
- Protects the shifter mechanism and components – The boot covers the hole where the gear shifter passes through the transmission tunnel. This prevents dirt, dust, and moisture from entering the linkage components which can cause binding or premature failure.
- Insulates noise and vibration – The boot will help reduce road noise, transmission spinning noise and vibrations from entering the cabin.
- Seals against air and heat – The transmission area of your car gets very hot. Not only is the transmission constantly spinning, but your exhaust runs right beside it. The shift boot will prevent the hot air from getting into the cabin.
Aesthetic:
- Cleans up your interior – Without the shift boot, your interior would have a giant hole in the middle of the center console. The boot gives the shifter area a finished look. Today there are many choices for shift boot materials depending on your style, but the most common OEM styles are leather or a suede/alcantara material.
Unfortuately, BMW no longer makes the shift boots for our older generation cars, so we took it upon ourself to create the best OEM style replicas we could. We found clean examples of these shift boots, cut apart the leather and took exact measurements of the OEM leather pieces. We then traced these pieces onto brand new leather and sewed them together. To make your life even easier, we had exact replica of the OEM boot ring molded out of ABS plastic and finished the assembly all in house.
What you get is a completely plug and play shift boot for your application. After our leather ones became one of our best selling products, we adding an alcantara version for each model as well.
Our shift boots are offered for the following BMW chassis: E30, E36 (TI/Z3 not available), E46, E39, and E9x (non M models only).
Pick up yours today and bring your interior back to the glory days.
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Race German OEM Style Shift Boots (Leather)
Race German OEM Style Shift Boots (Alcantara)
