Discovery leather gear knob (s)

One thing I’ve never been keen on with the Discovery II is the plastic gear knobs on both the main gearbox (manual) and the hi-low ‘box, they always looked and felt ‘cheap’ to me. The only other option (or so I thought) was to replace them with the ‘wooden’ knobs but I’m not overly keen on these either so I had a mooch around the internet looking for alternatives. There seems to be a plethora of ‘aftermarket’ gear-knobs available but, again none of them looked quite right. Eventually while I was browsing on that well known internet auction site renowned for relieving you of your hard earned money I stumbled upon a pair of genuine leather gear-knobs that were fitted to the limited edition ‘Adventurer’ model back around 2001, they were listed as ‘Indiana’ brown leather. In the auction photographs they actually looked more red than brown but I took a chance and put in a bid of £16.50 for the pair and won them, result!
I was even more pleased when I looked up the part numbers on specialist Land Rover parts suppliers sites, they list them as ‘UKJ000020AYW KNOB – GEAR CHANGE LEVER’ £55.40 + VAT and ‘IGC000010AYW  TRANSBOX KNOB INDIANA BROWN’ £28.58 + VAT, so that’s a grand total of £100.77 including VAT, that’s what I call a saving!
Because my vehicle has the dark tundra interior which mainly consists of muted, earthy colours the brown leather seems to compliment the interior well and also the leather is much more tactile and nicer in the hand. Fitting is simplicity itself, simply unscrew the existing plastic gear-knobs, unclip the gaiter surround, remove the rubber band from the groove in the bottom of the gear-knob and release then simply refit the new gear-knob in the reverse order.