Making billet aluminum stick, who else wants one? Maybe custom cabs too

Tech Talk
1

Is anybody interested in custom machined sticks/cabs? This just started as an after-hours personal project, but my employer has told me that if people want to buy them, I’m free to produce them as part of the business.

I’m a mechanical engineer/machinist, so the kinds of products I would be offering would have a completely different aesthetic from what I’ve been able to find out there so far. Less wood/plywood/acrylic and more aluminum/steel/copper/brass/etc. Unfortunately I haven’t finished mine yet, but here are some pictures/videos of random parts we’ve made, to give you an idea of what things in a machine shop look like. This is a very limited selection of stuff I happened to have on my phone already. These parts are all painfully simple and do not reflect the complexity of the stuff we can make, but I’ll try to make some concept models later to show what’s possible.

[Album] Imgur: The magic of the Internet

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtqtD9Rf5lI8Kh1UGcMw0sg

Here is a rough concept of the stick I made this morning. I’m a big JSRF fan (100% completion one-handed), so this seemed logical. JSRF logo at top will be a button with LED eyes. Finished size is around 13"x16"x3", and it will begin it’s life as a 70lb block of aluminum (will end up being around 12lb after everything is milled away). The only other piece will be a thin base plate/cover bolted to the bottom. There will be graffiti milled into the main top surface.

We can also do engraving, annodizing, inlays (almost any material you want), moving parts, and a bunch of other stuff that I won’t think of until somebody brings a concept to me and sparks the idea. The price for these would very greatly depending on what the customer wants, and I have to finish mine first to get a better idea, so I can’t really give you guys a price range yet. I’d like to ask what price you’d be willing to pay for something like this, so that I can get an idea of what I need to aim for. I definitely expect the starting price to be competitive with other professionally made custom sticks/cabinets.

Please keep in mind that I work at an engineering firm, so the only limit is what you’re willing to pay. I want to see what we can do in this market that hasn’t been done yet. Why can’t your stick or cabinet address you by name and load your personal control settings automatically via a biometric scanner? Why shouldn’t a cabinet be made out of big pieces of skeletonized aluminum like a 747, instead of sheets of plywood. Maybe it should have a voice-activated console-changer. It’s just something to think about, but first I need to prove that this is profitable, so smaller, simpler tasks would be best to start with.

2

Well first you need to have been here for 6 months before selling or advertising anything.
That or try to get a mods approval so you can openly sell.

What I would suggest is building a couple and posting them in the check out my arcade stick thread so people can get an idea of what you are capable of and you can start making a name for yourself and then when the 6 months is up you will have made plenty of potential customers.

3

My bad, didn’t notice that rule. Will do.

4

It looks… okay.

I’d rather not stab myself in the dick when trying to play though.

5

It’s such an inappropriate comment but it makes me laugh…

(Oohh… painful, though!) lol

More cabs, designs, and options are always welcome.

Pics first, please! Orders later!
(Most of us are used to waiting… It takes months, sometimes over a year for projects to come through. It’s better to get things debugged BEFORE you start shipping orders.)

BTW, sdg, what you’re doing for a living is very cool.
It’s creative and you’re using your head, too. Gotta be lots of fun at times.
How many other people can say that???

6

>Milled aluminum cab

Sweet God, I need this to exist now. I didn’t before, but now it’s all I can think about.

7

This is super cool. I’d probably pay somewhere around $150-200 for something like this, maybe more if the design I wanted was complex. How do you design what gets milled out? AutoCAD?

8

I would be interested in this in a different silhouette. Something like a Diamond VLX case in aluminum would be pretty baller. HS-0130 clone in billet? Holy Faps, Batman.

9

Design for the JSRF stick is now completely done and ready for manufacturing. I’ll do the CNC programming throughout the week when I can find time, and I’ll machine it over the weekend. I’ll machine the MK stick the following weekend. Can’t tell which I like more, bare aluminum or black anodized. Might make both.

Just as an aside, I hesitate to show these renders since the finished parts will look nothing like this as far as surface finish, because Solidworks Photoview does not have an option to simulate tooling marks. The JSRF stick looks polished here and the MK sticks look cast or sandblasted, but in reality they will both be covered in those cool little lines like in that imgur link above.

10

Oh also forgot to say the red in the MK logo will be backlit acrylic.

11

can ya do custom engraved balltops? :smiley:

12

Same question. PAS and Focus Attack have been toying with my emotions on the whole engraving thing. Definitely some people who would buy them here.

13

Well I have answers to all of these questions, but I’m hesitant to keep this discussion going because technically I’m on the wrong side of the law for having started the thread. Like I said, I neglected to check the rules closely enough. PM me maybe? Don’t want to piss anybody off when I’ve only been here for 4 days.

14

Just forget the selling/advertising thing for now and carry on with your project, post the results, let your results speak for themselves, people will contact YOU for work, no rules broken.

Good luck man, really interested to see how this project works out. Keep us posted!

15

MK sticks remind me of Big Pockets’ work:

http://www.joystickvault.com/showphoto.php?photo=90&cat=500&ppuser=20

-ud

16

I would be in for a hitbox variation.

17

Well I can’t tell just yet how much they would be, but the material alone for my JSRF one was $287. However, that’s because I bought an insanely huge piece of material (will post a picture with my hand or something next to it when it shows up). Obviously I will look into methods for reducing cost later, but this one is a personal project and a bit of a show-off piece, so who cares. As for the CNC side, we use BobCAM here. Here are a couple pics showing what the interface looks like.

This isn’t really the best representation of how the part will come out, I just threw some toolpaths in quickly as an example.

Totally doable, this one is just a weird shape because it’s the result of a sudden artistic impulse and I don’t have to worry about anybody but myself complaining about the fact that it’s uncomfortable to use.

Funny you should ask, I had just decided to include that in this design. Here are a couple pics of a shift knob that my coworker made for his Ford Focus ST.

I wil be engraving the JSRF logo into the top of a clear ball top, which I have drilled a hole into, shown below. My theory is that, because only the frosted part where I drilled refracts light, the logo should glow while the rest of the ball doesn’t. If it works like that it should really stand out, at least more than if the whole ball was glowing. It won’t quite work when viewed from the top though, since the whole thing glows from the top.

http://i.imgur.com/CXbguYQ.jpg

Dang, didn’t realize there was one so similar. Hope he’s not offended, lol.

I was thinking about doing of those, actually. I haven’t really been involved too deeply in the fight stick world, so this whole hitbox thing is new to me, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Seems really good from an ergonomic standpoint, which got me to thinking, why does it have to be flat? Why can’t it be shaped so that your hands sit in a more natural position, like those crazy ergo keyboards people make?

http://www.datahand.com/images/Resize%20of%20DEKonLap72rgb.jpg

http://cdn.pcandtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/safetype-ergonomics-keyboard.jpg

I’m not saying any of those would necessarily be a good idea, but it’s something to think about. I have an idea for something a little simpler and cheaper to machine, I’ll model it up later.

18

[quote=“sdg, post:17, topic:163931”]

o.O

19

On the real, most players probably won’t go over 400.

20

Being as it’s basically a diamond shape, why wouldn’t you rotate it 45deg. so it will fit into a square piece of stock more efficiently?
-ud