Suncom Starfighter Joystick

The other day I found a Suncom Starfighter joystick in my projects bin labeled as "needs repair, right and down only". I tested it and sure enough Up and Left didn't work at all unless you really push which I was unwilling to do. This isn't a joystick I ever had when I was a kid, but it's a real tank. It's the exact same internal design as the Tac-2 and other Suncom sticks. I definitely see why the Tac-2 is more popular with the much cooler ball-capped shiny metal stick. I remembered seeing Jan Beta repair one of these and went and grabbed that and a few other video guides.

As those videos show these sticks have a pretty unique and bullet proof design. A big conductive ball is wired to ground and makes contact with individual direction contacts. So there's no "switch" to have break. Jan's turned out to have a broken cable but otherwise it was mechanically fine.

Mine was a bit of a different case. I could see the contact pads all looked pretty worn but I could see spots on the ball where it seemed to have flat-spotted from use. I did some continuity testing and sure enough some of the contacts were iffy if you drove around them you'd lose contact. But the ball was the same story. It has cavities and driving around in that area you get poor connectivity in very small spots.

To the normal eye these are barely visible scuffs or spots. This is after scrubbing at this with Simichrome and the q-tip is to show that all the black tarnish had come off and this was as shiny as that thing's going to get

These spots still don't look great, but they are conductive after the simi-chroming.

This looks so much worse zoomed all the way in. These things really are pretty idiot-proof inside. You can just kind of see one of the spots at the top of the ball in this photo. To the eye it just looks like tarnish or a flat spot:

I mean, it works so I'm not going to worry about it until it doesn't work again. I'm sure we could add conductive material to that ball to make it last as-is. Maybe solder? But maybe conductive metal glue acting as bondo?

My next project is to fix two of my 3 Wico Command Control sticks.