Cut the shaft, drilled holes, and threaded them back together for easy removal without removing the c clip. There is a specific reason for this on a new stick I’m making. Hopefully I’ll get all my parts in so I’ll have it finished by next week and will update with more pics.
-bV
MOAR PICS plx
Won’t the fact that it’s screwed in mean that you’ll still have to access it from the bottom to lock it in?
Why not just use Phreakazoid’s Link?
How much height reduction? 2-3mm?
Torta: what would you like additional pics of?
d3v: I did a quick search for ways to quickly detach the shaft, but hadn’t seen Phreakazoid’s design. I still haven’t seen how much his costs or where to buy it; its probably in that thread somewhere. His design seems a bit more complex than mine. I just did this in a few hours with the tools I had available. I’m not even sure how to design a mechanism like that.
The fact that it is screwed in will mean that I’ll need a flathead, but I figure it’ll be easy enough to drill a hole in the bottom and carry around a small screwdriver in the cable area with a magnet.
RoboKrikit: There was a few mm height reduction, I’d estimate 2-3mm. Doesn’t seem to affect the feel of the stick.
That’s a nifty way to do it and a good use of tools on hand, I’ve seen other posts on different forums of people mentioning they’ve done that as well. There’s a lot of reasons I didn’t go that route, the effort to get it back together and off is a huge one. I prefer to keep it tool-less 
At any rate, if you want to try mine out to compare/use, you can pick them up at FocusAttack.com currently. Actually thank you for pointing out that there was no really good way to find that info out in the OP of my thread, so I copied the info that’s on my site’s page over and it’s now linked at the bottom of the FAQ.
I had an idea to do this a long time ago, it is just that I didn’t want to invest in a metal lathe and a tap and die.
Have you run into the problem of the shaft unscrewing during play? Much like some people who have issues with their balltop unscrewing?
Balltops won’t unscrew unless you don’t tighten them well.
I’ve never had that issue when I was paying attention to what I was doing.
I have had balltops unscrew but only because I didn’t tighten them properly before I closed up my stick case!
Unscrewing will also happen with stock condition joysticks because the assembly line worker didn’t tighten them well, either.
This is the same situation with shaft extensions. As long as they’re tightened well they won’t come off no matter how many degrees you rotate the shift… Shaft extensions are harder to remove than balltops, btw. I’ve had to wrap Artist’s tape around the tightened extension shaft (to avoid scratching the shaft with a jury-rigged clamping tool aka pliers) and use small pliers in addition to a flathead screwdriver to get extensions off! They go on tight and stay there until you remove them the way I did…
Depends, a misaligned screw will always eventually unscrew itself. I have this issue with the butteroj balltop for my TEK case. The hole isn’t aligned right but rather is slightly angled. Even if I tighten it really hard, it will eventually unscrew itself after heavy play.
What tool did you use for this?
you can use loctite
You talking about the paste or the Teflon-equse type tape? Either way, I’d suggest that you use T-Tape instead of the paste. Works well for keeping stuff together, even though the main purpose of T-Tape is to keep two metals from rusting at the threads in pluming jobs.
the paste. it comes in different color coded strengths
additionally, you could use plumbers tape (the white stretchy stuff)
That’s T-Tape (Teflon Tape). 
we used a cutoff saw, lathe, drill bits, and tap. I haven’t put much playtime on it but I’m pretty confident its not gonna come unscrewed if tightened well.