I’m in the process of doing this for myself, but it occurs to me that if I get a group buy going, others might be interested.
Rather than going with plain old plastic ball tops, I was looking at something a little more…oh, I dunno…“caviar”. No good reason, just for the sake of doing it. :wgrin:
Anyhoo. I have some sample pieces coming in both 35mm and 45mm sizes of the following materials:
Acrylic
Solid Aluminum
Hollow Aluminum
Black Glass
Black Soda Lime
Rubber
Carbon (Hollow Core)
Chrome (Steel, soft polish)
Nylon
Polyethelene
Clear Quartz
Stainless Steel
Sapphire Clear
Sapphire Ruby
Titanium
Now, I don’t get to keep these. They have to go back. I figure once they arrive I can take pictures and if enough people are interested I might be able to get a group buy going. I’m particularly curious about the black glass, carbon, and stainless pieces. Thoughts?
That’s really cool. I’d be rather interested in Chrome, Solid Aluminum, Sapphire (Either) and Titanium. Some pics would be awesome. My question is how well would the spring work with those heavier ball tops on it?
The more I think about it, carbon and titanium would be the way to go. My wedding ring is made of titanium, and you’d swear it was plastic it’s so light. Hollow carbon would do well too. The others I just won’t know until the samples show up. I’ll take pics and weight them.
dude, titanium is freaking expensive and drilling the hole and tapping it properly would be very impracticle. Anyways, I’d be interested if you could pull it off :). Other materials are cool too.
Just a head’s up that there’s a metal finishing place about an hour from here that can anodize aluminum and titanium. If the solid or hollow aluminum are nice, I can get just about any color you could get a mag-lite in.
he’s ordering sample ball shaped pieces of those materials and it’s not very fun to sand it down to a dice shape. Although you can get cube pieces of those materials so a dice top would be very possible.
Actually, it’s not so hard to cast something like that. The hard part is doing it so that the flower still looks like a flower after pouring hot poly onto it. So scratch that.
Actually, I can do dice this morning. It’s called hit the local auto shop (happens to be Auto Zone here), get a dice gearshift knob, and re-tap if needed. Oooooor…go to your local tabletop RPG or comic shop, grab the largest 1D6 you can find (or ask the guy behind the counter to order one large enough for ya), take it home and tap it. If you want to pay me for it, I can do that for you too. I won’t be taking orders until AFTER I have a group purchase pulled together though, cuz to be blunt…tapping isn’t much fun.
Heck, I can do all kinds of freaky shaped joystick tops. I kinda figured people wouldn’t want them though.
BTW…I might have another material added to that list:
cubic zirconia.
Just in case you ever wanted a balltop that looks like one big diamond.
wouldn’t you need like a… diamond tipped drillbit and tap to do that?
hey, by the way, mind telling me what size tap the balltop uses? I have a glassball that already has a hole in it and I want to tap it and turn it into a balltop. I’m really regretting not buying the tap set at a garage sale a while back…
I honestly don’t know. Easiest way to figure it out is if you have a hardware store near you is to take the joystick in. They usually have thread sizers there that can tell you what threads you need to use.
This is my ignorance speaking…have no idea how hard 8.5 is. Might find out though!
Bah. Bad news guys. I’m told that “metric sizes are custom made”, so I can’t get the material samples. I think I’m going to ask what they have that is readily available so I can at least get my hands on the materials and figure out what will work and what won’t. Sorry to string people along. :\ If there’s enough interest they’ll machine the balltops on a per-order basis, so I won’t be able to keep a stock of them. At least I don’t think.
I don’t think rubberized balls would be all that bad, as long as it wasn’t the same type of rubber that was used on the Mad Catz Dreamcast pads. That stuff came off worse than any pencil eraser I’ve ever seen. Great pads, and the rubberized d-pad was probably more functional than the plastic version, but blech!
Do the transparent balls have threaded inserts, or are they molded with threads?
Wow. That took forever. Presuming these guys don’t back out, I finally have some material samples coming for both the balls AND for the finserts required to thread them. Whew!
If anyone has requests for customer ball tops/knobs, hopefully I will be able to start taking orders sometime next week, pending available materials. I think I’m going to try picking up some cats-eye marbles to test on as soon as I get the finserts in.
Takes an M6-1.0 thread. Note that I’ve found that finserts are the way to do this, not tapping. Tapping is far too difficult, and even the bubble balltops use finserts. If I were to do cubic zirconia, I’d have the manufacturer bore the holes for the finserts for me ahead of time, I ain’t stoopid y’all. :rock:
No good reason, just for the sake of doing it. :wgrin:
