I originally thought one of my kids had wrapped a wire arount my stick shift, then I realized that the loose wires (about 6" on each side) were coming from the stick shift itself! Was somebody messing with my car? What do these wires do?
Pops off? My '93 model needed a damn good pull to replace recently (the stitching had come apart after years of abuse - prior to me buying the car I might add), and I was warned by the BMW dealer parts desk to be careful as often replacing gear knobs would result in elbows being hurt when hitting the windscreen at speed :P
Suffice to say I didn't hurt myself, although it was a close call.
I'm not sure how they attached the knob on your '93, but on my '97 it's a set of four plastic "fingers" in the knob that engage a slot around the top of the metal shift post. About 1.5 of the "fingers" are worn or broken on mine (like you, before buying the car), so the grip is a little tenuos. It's not a problem during normal driving, but if I'm driving angry and take it out on the post during a shift, I often find my self in neutral and holding the shift knob. I can pull it off pretty easily if I want to.
One of those annoying-but-not-cripplingly-so defects that cars (my cars, anyway) accumulate with time.
The old ones were a friction fit and bloody hard to get off. You had to be committed and have belief in the person/book who told you it just pulled off, honest. No way they would have fallen off. Such is progress.
Yeah, friction fit it is (with a little bar and recess which pair up to prevent the knob spinning on top of the stick). Originally I thought it was glued or screwed on, it just wouldn't shift, but the dealer insisted it pulled and he was right. The new knobs come with a screw in the top but have nothing to do with attachment to the stick (looks like the screw holds the internal sleeve that fits onto the stick).
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