Hi guys, long time lurker first time poster here.
I’m just about finished making my own custom stick with a wooden frame and plexiglass button board, but the build quality isn’t quite what I expected. I’m no carpenter so the frame isn’t perfect and the button board is a little on the thin side (so I could use snap in buttons) and it flexes a little under pressure. All in all it’s usable but I want better, before I get in to my actual proposal I’ll give a little of my background first:
I work for a large industrial company in the defense sector. Since we make weapons for the army, navy and airforce we’re constantly trying to improve our public image through various charity work. Since I work within the Procurement department I have easy access to suppliers who could give us a good price on materials, and the company itself has skilled sheet metal workers (and machines with that can produce military quality goods!) and welders that can turn sheets of steel in to vessels that can withstand massive pressure.
With this in mind, I figured I can do better than a few planks of wood nailed to a piece of plastic! So here’s my proposal.
With a little help from the SRK community, I would like to design and fabricate a short run of joystick chasis’, no sticks/buttons, controller boards/padhacks. Just plain chasis that you can buy your own parts for and paint as you’d like.
Since the easiest way for me to get people at my company involved is by making this charity work, I’ll distribute them for the price of materials plus a small mark-up to charity. Say $10-20 to Childsplay?
Before I go ahead and start organising this though, I guess the real question is how interested are people in buying something like this? The more people who are interested the cheaper the boards will become to make so I guess a bare minimum for a first run would be say 10 chasis.
Secondly, I’m in no way a custom stick guru. It would be much appreciated if more experienced members of the community could help design the chasis. I guess an important factor in this is creating a product that easily modable so a variety of sticks/buttons/controller boards/padhacks can be used. In addition to this request for help, I guess it would be useful for the more artistically skilled members of the community to put together some sketches of what they would like the finished stick to look like (though try to keep it relatively basic, rounded edges/chasis in the shape of the letters “SRK”/etc while cool would take considerable time to fabricate that my company may consider outside the scope of charity work).
Finally, if enough people are interested and we can bash our heads together enough to come up with a design everybody likes. I’ll fund and organise the project and then forward the finished products on to a “trusted” member of the community who can manage the sales and processing the donations to our chosen charity. (Eg. An SRK site admin since I’m just a random guy who could be out to rip people off. I know you all trust me already, I just want quality stick of my own! But I’d rather not have this project stall because people think it will turn in to some kind of a scam).
Anyway, there’s my suggestion. What do you guys think?