As part of my preparation for the Real Street Eliminator this weekend, I'm finally getting around to fixing something that has been bugging me for a while! Unfortunately, I don't have a very good 'before' picture of the hole in the console plate, but if you take a look at either of the below pictures, you can see the shifter handle at least, and a glimpse of the place:

I knew that I wanted to cover up that hole in the plate and the shifter lever, but I didn't have direct access to a machine to make a trim ring to do it. Enter my uncle, Sam, who works at a college where they have a machine shop! :) So, I drew up a picture:

and sent it off to him. A week later, I had the ring in hand! I took the console plate and drilled out the holes to run the screws through, and I bent up a piece of sheetmetal to support the leather boot from the back. The leather is from a Lokar shifter boot kit, and it worked perfectly for my application! I screwed everything together and dropped it in place. And voila! Here are the pics:

The pics aren't the best, but you get the idea... I'm REALLY excited about how this turned out, as it covers the hole and the boots works perfectly! The only problem is I didn't allow quite enough room on the bottomside for the shifter to make full travel (ie: 2nd and 4th gears). But, I can move the console slightly to fix that I believe...