About Me

Hello! I’m an engineer and Smash 64 player. Years ago I started this project with many different iterations to the OEM joystick so that it could last longer. This included changing the materials of the gears and joystick to things such as brass and nylon. While these modifications helped the joystick last a little longer, it did not solve the issues with the mechanical design of the joystick.

Redesigning the N64 Joystick

I would not be the first person to make a redesign to the OEM joystick. Linus had designed the SteelStick before I even started this project and there have been a lot of clones since its creation. So why didn’t I use the same concept? While I was impressed by Linus’ design, I believe his design is a patch rather than a solution to the issues with the OEM joystick. Along with solving these issues, I wanted to improve the design of the joystick in general. This meant reducing the amount of wear points for serviceability, resolving flickback, and making the joystick more repeatable all while preserving the integrity of the original design.

Here is a cross section of my redesigned stick. The most obvious difference is how the stick is held in place. It is now held in place to the gear with a steel pin rather than being constrained by the gate and bowl. Because it is held by the pin, the stick no longer touches the bowl removing the point contact that was once there. Instead of putting all the load on a point, it is now distributed along the surface area of the pin significantly reducing wear. The joystick is also now repeatable because it no longer depends on the gate to hold it in place, reducing tolerance stack ups in the assembly. With this new design, the main points of wear would be the pin location and the bottom of the stick that rides along the slot of the gear. By making the gears with a harder material than the stick, only the stick should wear over time which should be easy to replace. The parts are made with resin printed plastics to reduce their weight as having too much weight results in larger flickback from the momentum. All the redesigned parts are possible for me to produce on my own 3D printer. My only bottleneck with this design would be acquiring reused OEM parts like SteelSticks but the condition of the parts is not important for the reasons stated above.

Testing and Feedback

Even though the design of the joystick had been done for over 2 years from my initial twitter post, there was still some refinement to do. I had several competitive Smash 64 players including myself test the stick. With any project, nothing works the first try and there were some failures. Initially the printed parts were made from the same material which meant I had to replace both the gear and stick. Another issue from testers was that the stick would snap as well as the pinned gear that held the stick. The issue with resin printing is that most materials are brittle and cannot handle the impacts during gameplay. However, industrial 3D resins have recently been developed to match the hardness and impact resistance of polycarbonate and ABS. With the durability of the stick resolved, the last thing I needed to resolve was flickback of the stick users were still experiencing. In mechanical systems damping is used prevent overshoot. Damping usually comes in the form of friction, which we want to avoid. Luckily, viscous damping exists so the fluid experiences friction instead of the mechanical parts that would otherwise experience abrasion. By using a viscous damping lubricant to the joystick, I was able to still reduce the wear rate while adding the damping needed to prevent flickback. With these updates, I’ve received positive feedback from testers and the joystick design is in a state where I am finally comfortable to release.

Release

When they are produced, I will be selling these joysticks on my store. Because the joysticks parts are made and assembled by me, they will not be readily available. Another bottleneck that exists is the use of OEM parts such as the encoders, encoder PCB, and gate. In order to get these joysticks to as many people in the community as possible, I will also have retrofit kits available which include all the necessary 3D printed parts. I will also be selling other N64 controller parts in the future such as the buttons.