TE joystick always reading down

My Mad Catz TE SF4 stick for PS3 is constantly inputting the down direction. If I press up on the stick, it will stop scrolling down. I can only go right or left if I jiggle between up-right and down-right or up-left to down-left. I can hear the click for off and on for all 4 directions.

I took the top off my stick and disconnected and reconnected the harness to the joystick and to the board and it didn’t help.

Do I need to replace a board? Is there some other tests I can do to pinpoint what needs fixin’?

Sorry if these have been answered somewhere else, I did some searching but couldn’t find someone with a similar problem.

Thanks for the help

Is the microswitches on the stick sticking? When you have the stick open take off the gate and pull the pcb that has the microswitches for the directions out and push the red tabs in. Do they stick or does it click and pops back out?

Try flipping the harness to the joystick upside down.

I believe I had that exact same problem the first time I modded a stick.

thanks for the replies everyone. The problem is I started having the issue on a stock stick without ever opening the case up. I only opened it up to check that everything was still connected.
I am a novice at using the multimeter but I imagine that if I connect to the ground pin and then touch each of the direction pins that I will be able to see a resistance change when I select each direction? Is there a way to touch the pins on the board in a similar fashion to actually drive directional signals and see them on the PS3 to eliminate a board problem?

thanks again

So I disconnected the joystick from the board and plugged in the USB and I get the same behavior, constantly outputting the down direction. So this leads me to think there is something wrong with the board itself somewhere. Does anyone have any ideas besides replacing the whole board?

Did you try flipping the harness like said above?

You denoted that you unplugged it and re-plugged it in, but did you actually flip the harness that goes to the JLF?

My advice get one of toodle’s JLF harness replacements for the TE.
Issue with the stock harness is that it is too easy to install the plug into the joystick backwards

using the actual correct connector (like the Sanwa JLF-H harness, Seimtsu HP5 harness or Toodles JLF-TE harness) is actually almost impossible to install the connector backwards.

If you disconnected the joystick wiring harness from the board side and plugged in the stick to the system and you are still getting the input, sounds like the board to me.

I’ll try reconnecting the stick and flipping the connector tonight. If that doesn’t work I’ll take out the PCB/Home/Turbo board and see if there is some FOD on any of the connectors causing a short. Or maybe it could even be in the wiring harness itself (I didn’t remove it completely, I just unplugged the the joystick side).
Keeping my fingers crossed.

So I flipped the connector and even took the wire harness for the JLF completely off and it is still outputting the down direction. I took off the PCB and looked it over and couldn’t see anything causing a short anywhere. I guess I will order a cthulhu from toodles and hope that fixes the problem.

Thanks everyone for all your advice.