At some point last year, Olivia’s rubber shift boot ripped, leaving an opening for dirt to end up in the shift mechanism below. Of course, I bought a replacement and installed it prior to heading to the Louisville stop of the Hot Rod Power Tour, but the new boot proved to be too stiff; no matter where I placed the top edge of it (where it attaches to the shift lever), it would cause the shifter to pop out of gear. This caught me by surprise once while turning left into a gas station, when the shifter popped out of first gear while going through the busy intersection, and I had to figure out how to get it to stay in gear so that I could move out of the way of traffic. It then ripped once I got going again. $50 down the drain.
Since then, I’ve been driving around with a ripped boot, but I’ve finally decided to do something about it and craft up a new one. And since it’s still a bit cold outside, I figured this is a good time to knock out a project that doesn’t involve freezing my fingers off in the garage.
Making the Shift Boot
I purchased some brown faux leather fabric, interfacing material (which adds some stiffness and stability as the fabric was more flimsy and lightweight than I wanted), and black heavy-duty upholstery thread and ventured over to the storage unit to grab the ripped shift boot off Olivia.
The first step was to make paper templates so that I could figure out how to cut the fabric. I decided to use the bottom of the rubber shift boot in the final product, as it would add some stability and because the bezel plate has curved edges that need something to sit on top of instead of resting directly on the transmission tunnel. I measured along the sides of the inner part of the shift boot, which worked out to be 3 inches for one side and about 3 ¾ inches for the other. On a couple pieces of paper, I measured 2 inches up from the edge of the paper and then drew my lines for the aforementioned measurements. Next, I folded the paper to find the halfway points for those lines, measured 5 inches above them (about how tall I decided I wanted the shift boot to be), and drew triangles out of those points. I then cut out the triangles.
Next was to prep the fabric. I traced the templates twice onto the fabric and the interfacing material, so that I had eight pieces total (a piece of fabric and interfacing for each of the four sides). For the fabric, I actually made the pieces a little bigger for the seam allowance — I added a quarter-inch on the sides that would be sewn. I then ironed the rough side of the interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric to bond them together.
I’ll admit that I actually kind of suck at sewing, so I broke out my sewing machine. This allowed me to at least have even stitches for this project and made it so sewing wouldn’t take ages to complete, like it would if I decided to hand-sew everything together. I laid out the four pieces and sewed the seams together, with the right sides of the pieces facing each other, then hand-sewed the pieces at the top to create a sort of hem. (If this were a fabric like cotton, I would’ve sewn a hem along the bottom of each piece, as well, to keep the fabric from fraying, but that wasn’t a concern for the faux leather.) Next, I flipped the shift boot so that the right side was facing out and test fit it on the piece of the old rubber shift boot that I was planning on attaching it to.
Next, I had to figure out how to attach the boot fabric to the rubber. I decided on some E6000 adhesive spray that I had laying around in my craft stuff. It unfortunately takes a while to dry, so after I glued everything together, I used binder clips to hold things in place. Later that night, however, I found that it wasn’t bonding as well as I wanted, so I ended up sewing the shift boot’s corners through some of the holes on the rubber piece to secure it on, then attempted to use the glue on the longer sides. I had to wait until the next day to make sure all was good and to install it in Olivia. In the morning, I discovered the glue didn’t work in those spots, but since it was going to be covered and secured with the bezel piece on top anyway, I wasn’t too worried.
The installation went well, and I’m pleased with how everything turned out overall. There’s one screw that I need to get a longer version of because of the fabric’s added thickness, but other than that, everything fit well, and the shifter moves into the different gears easily.