Whoever did that to that poor TE needs to be taken outside and hung by their ballsack.
Cruelty to joysticks is inhuman.
What I find interesting is that they bought different colored Sanwa buttons, a Bat Top and adapter, and cared enough about 6-button layout to eliminate the PPP/KKK buttons. So they must have been competitive…right?
And yet whoever it was decided to desecrate the stick to such a level. Intriguing!
“Jesus Christ, Bob…Your custom is sick!”
“I know dude, thanks.”
I wish this was a common enough thing to warrant a stick rescue thread.
That kid REALLY loved his xbox 360! That’s a great start at removing all of that crap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6urRX_szKQ
He was spray painting that stick to this song like a boss
@RageousX That is a heroic effort you already put in.
I am not worried about little Bobby Xbox (that what I now dub him or her).
I more focused on how you going to transform this stick.
Would have never guessed that a magic eraser would work so well for paint removal. Wishing I had tried that before sanding the fuck out of the Namco stick I restored a while back.
Most shit paint jobs are so shit that you could practically peel the paint off.
Except for the one time I gotten painted TE sides in the mail. I don’t know how they did it but they managed to corrode and bubble the plastic under the paint as they got the paint it self to orange peel.
In placed that paint bonded to the plastic on the molecular level. It is like they tried to thin-out the paint with acetone. They were that mismatching Red and Blue SOULCALIBUR TE Sides, so throwing them out wasn’t a lost.
Back on the topic on hand, most people don’t know a lick about how to paint, no prepping the surface first, so no cleaning, sanding and primer before paint. The Paint never really bonds to the surface, thus easy to clean off.
Especially a kid like Lil Bobby Xbox who painted his TE with Paint Markers. Kids like that is the reason at 35 I still get carded for buying model paint at a hobby shop. I don’t even get carded for liquor.
I kinda know RageousX’s pain, when I buy a old game console. I got to take the console apart, hand scrub the plastic housing with dish soap before running it in the dish washer to get the housing clean.
The PC Engine I got a few months back was so dusty I though it was buried in King Tut’s tomb. The main board should never smell of dust and mildew.
If you look closely at the bottom panel photo, you’ll see it was originally an MvC2 stick. Those came with yellow on the main six and white on the 7/8, so he pulled two yellows out of the 2K 3K slots and replaced them with white. You can also see the layout written on the strip of brown tape (LB and RB in 3P and 3K, the unusually standard layout for the MvC2 TE). Were I a betting man, I’d say he played the shit out of Marvel 2. LP HP A1 on the top, LK HK A2 on the bottom. The buttons I threw out had shit tons of grime in between the cracks… definitely from hours of gameplay, not dust-gathering. He may have even expected to have white correspond to A1 A2 (started playing MvC3?) at one point, but the original setup on the tape is definitely MvC2.
Taking a closer look at my morning after work, the left side (magic eraser only) is slightly dulled but only an OCD level of recognition, the right side (which was exposed to nail polish remover is a bit more noticeably dulled when compared side by side with a clean TE:
@ed1371, you mentioned plastic polish? It could probably use a little for touch-up.
I’ll scrub down the other parts this evening after I get back from work and post the results. Will dedicate my turbo panel attempt to @Feargus001100.
Like I mentioned before, this is going to basically be an RJ-45 monster for a classic arcade pal. I’m having him ship me a box of dead controllers for each of his systems, and I’ve drudged up [this old SRK thread](RJ-45 Multi Console Cthulhu Arcade Stick Tutorial Ver.2 for info on the pinouts for everything. I’ll even go the extra mile and cap 'em with NE8MCs. I’ve never ventured into that territory before (all of my projects for people have been your basic whatever-the-current-gen dual-mod), but I’m a sysadmin/network engineer by day, and have all the crimping/multimeter tools and knowhow to figure it out. I honestly didn’t intend to even attempt refurbishing this stick at all. It was my wife who found it at a thrift store and sent me pictures, and I immediately told her “ugh fucking ruined”… before realizing that the cable door was probably intact and it was worth $6 just for that. I made a Blanka-themed stick for another pal a couple months ago, but the TE base I got for it had a broken one. Once I got this at home, I realized it was perfectly functional and worth the effort to refurbish. Plus it makes for a really fun story.
Did the magic eraser remove the tampographed “Start”, “Select” and “Headphone jack” markings as well?
I haven’t tried, but that area is thankfully unscathed so I won’t need to attempt it. I’m willing to bet it would though, given the nature of what I’ve witnessed so far.
Edit: Actually, I’ll get back to you tonight on this. The headphone text is part of the trashed area, so I’ll find out.
kudos on the thrift store find! nice to see it coming along!
Glad the eraser worked for you… another one of my secrets out in the wild.
Quoting MYSELF… that’s a first! OK once you have used the eraser… I would move on to lightly wet sanding. TBH I would probably use 2k and 3k and then use this other little secret of mine: http://www.amazon.com/Meguiars-G18116-Clear-Polishing-Compound/dp/B006FUT154
And folks doubted the powah of the erasah…
Its not like I just make this stuff up here… I am out there getting dirty (or at least paint and stuff).
Uhh you could just buy a replacement panel. The other stuff can be saved. I am impressed a magic eraser did such a good job. I only use those to clean my shoes lol.
Did the magic eraser remove the tampographed “Start”, “Select” and “Headphone jack” markings as well?
Cool. I look forward to the results.
Mainly asking because I have an SE casing where I want to remove the Start/Select/Headphones markings, and I want to affect the underlying plastic finish as little as possible (obviously). Figured I’d see if you had to try first since there’s other gunk that needs to be cleaned off anyways.
Man… You should never use acetone on abs. Guess you figured that out now. Really you’re lucky it isn’t worse.
Who still sells metal panels?
I don’t think anyone sells custom metal panels for the TE anymore.
On the flipside, in theory, there should be plenty of people with an old stock TE panel that they’ve replaced with either a custom one (from B-Boy Tekken, blklighting21, or even Mad Catz’ own Noir or MK panels); maybe somewhere who did that would be willing to sell their old one?
As an alternative, there’s always Art’s replacement panels from Tek-Innovations.
Thats great for the TE, but not every situation is going to have metal panels available.
Oh definitely, no arguments there.
But since this thread has RageousX cleaning up an old TE, I thought that was where this conversation was going?