Ikea Arcade Stick V2 - Shiny Shiny!

Continued from Part Two.

When it comes to art, I am the most indecisive human alive. This is why I've never had a tattoo, despite spending the best part of a decade drunk.

So the styrene sheet goes down over the naked plywood for now. It will protect the surface while I decide what to do, and it still looks nice enough.

Drilling styrene isn't easy, as it's a very brittle plastic, but it sands very well! So to make the holes i first started with a very small drill bit (like 4mm) and light pressure. Some cracking is to be expected, but it's containable.

Once that's done, a sanding ball (which looks like the world's roughest chupa-chup, on a drill bit) was applied to the hole with light pressure at a high rpm, which starts to sand/melt the plastic. The melting stops the cracks from growing, and once the hole is nearly to size it's time to cool it off, slow it down, and just sand the edges smooth.

Repeat eight times, and voila!

I think this design is very close to meeting my goals of being easy to build, affordable, and capable of rivalling the finish quality of a retail stick. I'll make a build video next, for anyone who wants the full step-by-step instructions. :)

All that's left now is to add a Brook UFB to make it work across all of the modern consoles and PC (it's in the mail!).

If you're wondering what this thing weighs:

It's about 700g lighter than a TE2+, but it's hardly going to blow away!