T_He

Hi,

Here is a picture of my steptronic gear shift which has original M5 gear knob and slightly modified surrounding plate and leather cover. Lights are still missing, but it is under constructions. All gear shift positions (P, R, N, D and DS) are working perfectly. Buttons doesn?t have any functions yet, since my car is 530i, not an M5 What do you guys think of my mod?



Best regards,
- THe -

BetterMakeWay

With the chance of being your partypooper i really don't like it. Why? Because it's just out of place if you ask me. The short gearlever of the smgIII suits perfect such a switch knob, and the buttons...well...besides the fact that they are no functional and probably will never be...it just tries to much. It tries to copy the SMGIII. All the mods that get an ordinary 5 series too close to the m5 is a no no if you ask me. Why spend all that money on them (not you, in general) when you can have with a bit more fuss the real thing?!

mic325

It looks great!! So what did you do to the surrouding plate to make the shifter work? I was thinking about the shift knob, but think it is kind of out of place with the steptronics surrounding plate.

Harry

Looks great! You can make it perfect with the M5 Idrive Knob. That matches the smg plate colour. Go for it.
And don?t forget the lightning for the shifter.

T_He

Thanks. Do you have picture of M5 Idrive knob since I thought that it is exactly same as in my car or at least in same color.

Br,
- Tommi

T_He

Hi,

I agree that it looks out of place without surrounding plate, but with it has much more fancy look. That?s why I thought go for this mod. My intension is not to have M5 copy of the car, but I really like to look of SMG shifter.

Here is short step by step instruction, if you wanna go for this mod:

1.) Cut original surrounidng plate as in the following picture marked with red.



2.) Remove plastic as marked blue in the picture. After that you should have three pieces of plastic; original cover, button and center piece. now cut the center piece in two parts.



3.) Weld pieces together as shown in the picture



4.) Fill weldings with plastic packel and grind with water sandpapers starting from 600 all the way to 1200.



5.) Paint with gray primer, paint with silver and finally paint semi gloss lack all over the surrounding cover.

6.) Take M5 knob and cut the plastic frame away from it and cut leather to smaller. Cut circle plastic frame into two pieces and weld some plastic to extend it to ellipse.

7.) Take original steptronic leather cover and cut it half. Cut unnessary leather away until it fits tigtly to ellipse plastic frame and after that sew up leather pieces. Finally glue the new leather to plastic frame.

8.) Install it to your car...



9.) Create new wiring harness for the lights in the knob. This is what I?m working on at the moment.

Br,
- Tommi

my530i

I have only one word to say to you "Super"!
You're such a handy man.

Sky

Using my Nokie phone camara

vstegmann

Hi,

and for the buttons....

If I had 4 free buttons there I would:

• Put the iDrive Video Interface Switch on one (switch between external Video and iDrive) to not need to use a remote control.
• if no BMW BT Phone is installed put the accept/reject button of an after market BT Phone unit there

regs
Volkmar

my530i

Sounds like a good idea, but we need to find out which wire of the interface to use to switch the screen