Custom Paddleshift Paddles

[Usel]

I have been asked to provide some more information on some paddleshifters I have made, it won't be a guide but will do my best with the photos I have:



You will need the following:

Mini R55 R56 R57 Paddleshift's £20‐£40. They don't sell on ebay very quickly at all so send offers or watch items and wait for offers. Buyers market.



Normal trims for the back of steering wheel:



Normal Back cover for steering wheel:



Paddleshift's from a 1/3 etc... series about £30:



At this stage you can modify the back cover and wheels trims and fit the paddles as they are, they will look like this:



They sit a little higher than oem but could be modified to sit lower. You can also buy black mini paddles if that would match your wheel better.

Now onto modifying the paddles. On the black part of the paddle you can remove the top cover where the wires come out. Then you can unscrew the chip with the wires and pull out the brass pin and remove the silver paddle from the black part. This thread will show a little detail on this:

https://www.z4-forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=140682&hilit=Auto+paddle

Now to shape the paddle, I used a belt sander, bosch multitool with cutting blade and a dremel.

You want a shape like this:

 

[Usel]

Drills the 2 holes like in the above photos, countersink and buy some bolts like these:



The nuts need to be hot glued into the new paddle. The black plastic fixings for the paddle chips need to be removed (arrowed):



With those removed you have about 4-5mm to place the nuts with a little glue, when set fill the whole area up with as much hot glue as possible but don't overfill. You want it to be level with the top edge. No photos I'm afraid.

With the nuts in place you can screw the paddles on. I added some padded double side tape in black to help space and also add extra strength. The tape is about 1-2mm thick.

The black part of the which you removed from the silver paddle earlier needs the 2 guide studs removed like this:



The paddle can now be reassembled and the chips placed back on the paddles.

The back trims need to be cut to allow the paddles to fit. Like this:

 

[Usel]

The back also needs to be trimmed to fit over the paddles. You can't use the oem paddleshift back cover because the angle you need to tip the new paddleshift is lower and the back cover won't fit.

When fitting the paddles you need to tip them lower than normal, hopefully these photos help:









A few more photo's of the wheel in the car:







For the wiring you need the yellow wire from the 2 pin connectors on the left and right side paddles. These both connect to the slip ring.

From the 3 pin connectors on the paddles you need the brown wire on the right and the green on the left. These are the ground wires. Check them with a multimeter to make sure they make a circuit when you pull the paddle. Yellow to brown on right and yellow to green in the left. These 2 wires (green and brown) need connecting together and connecting to the little ground screw on the steering wheel.

All other wires need taping up or, ifconfident you have it correct, removing. There is room for them to just be taped up. I just put heat shrink over the ends.

Some old photos from when I was testing:







You may notice from one of the photos I used the 4 pin socket on the slip ring which is for the multifunction buttons. I didn't have a slip ring with the 2 pin connector at the time.