I’ve been meaning to tart-up my xbox pads for a long time, and given the cheap prices on ebay (and the fact that anything I want to do these days needs to be possible in an hour or two in the evenings and quiet while RAR goes to sleep,) I finally got around to doing it last week.
Controller shells are nothing new, they’ve been around for quite a while now, but they’re so commonplace these days that the prices have dropped to very-affordable. That coupled with the abundance of different colours you can get now makes it an easy option for just about anyone.
I’ve had my pads in pieces a few times now, so I wasn’t too worried about doing it. They’re fairly simple when it comes down to it, as long as you aren’t planning any soldering (lights, auto-fire etc.,) it’s just a plastic case around a small pcb with surface mounts for the buttons. I’d never used a third-party shell, so I was a bit worried about the build quality; no-one wants something squeaking and creaking like an arthritic mouse in their hands.
It turns out my fears were unfounded. There were only two small problems as such that I came across, the rest of the pad is just as solid as the official ones. Firstly the transparent ring around the guide button in the middle of the pad – the original was just too tight to fight in the new shell. I probably could have forced it, but didn’t want to risk it, especially as the new shell shipped with its own version. Secondly was the sync button. If you take one of your pads apart you’ll see that the sync button on the back of the pad is a teeny piece of plastic sitting on a plastic pin. The original is very tight-fitting, the new is much looser. In my ham-fisted attempts to get the two halves of the pad back together when I’d finished, I dislodged the button far more times that I’d have liked. With hindsight, the tiniest bit of blu-tak on the pin would have solved everything.
After about half-an-hour I had a completed pad with new triggers and thumbsticks, and best of all, a T8H (the security screw the controllers use) screwdriver to use again. The cost of one of these in mose shops would be more than half the cost of the whole shell, which only makes it an even bigger bargain.
Bananapad!
As you can see in the photo, I opted to keep the original coloured guide and action buttons, the yellow replacements were just a step too far for me when it came down to it. With another two pads sat idle at home – with increasingly worn thumbsticks – some more changes are in the offing.