My father just purchased one of these, 4 cylinder (with Bosch Injection to each cylinder, I must admire the german engineering), Grey paint, minimal wheelwell rust and very little interior damage on the seats. All in all, good condition. However, the thing that has us scratching our heads is the 5 speed... how do you reverse on it? We've thrown the stick every which way, pushed, pulled, ect. I cannot for the life of me find a gearshift diagram.
I knew someone who had an 84 318i. His reverse was right to the left of 1. So the pattern was: TOP: R 1 3 5 BOT: - 2 4 - (sorry, can't align it properly here) Shift as though you're shifting into first, except push harder to the left and push up. As for the above post; I honestly have never seen that before except in a Maserati I think... lol
Thanks for the replies! It was a dogleg, but not like the pic you linked.. I thought it would be like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Manual_Dogleg.png, but it was actually like user az3579 said: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Manual_Layout_2.PNG Fortunately, no buttons or pushing/pulling needed, you just gotta throw the thing waaaay left the waaay up. I almost hit our garage finding it the first time. Thanks for the help, peeps, we'll try getting some pics up later.
If it's like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Manual_Layout_2.PNG then it's not a dogleg. That's just the standard 80-83 e21 5 speed getrag, probably. The doglegs sell for like $2,000 - if you have one and don't really track it, you might as well replace it with the standard 5 speed and sell it for some extra cash. The standard 5 speeds aren't very valuable - usually just worth a case of beer plus shipping. It does take a little bit of effort to get it into reverse. Redline MTL transmission fluid helps a bit.
