A few years ago, I finally got around to assembling my own custom fightstick. It’s somewhat barebones, and I just used a bunch of old stickers rather than try to get custom art, but it was a fun process, and an odd journey. Let’s start at the beginning.
One day, a friend of mine in a discord I frequent was selling some of his old Gamerfinger buttons with some custom switches in them (Kailh Pro Purples). Being tangentially interested in mechanical keyboards, I thought the idea of putting one in an arcade button was neat, so I bought them off him and put them in my old Eightarc stick.
Playing with the new buttons was a really weird experience, at first. Most arcade buttons have practically no resistance, so having stiff buttons like these was really odd. After I got used to them, it became immensely satisfying to do long combos with them. Then I started to think the classic mechanical keyboard thought; what if I could find an even better feeling button switch? So, I started doing some testing.
This is an assortment of keyboard switches, and then a set of Crown / Samducksa 202s, with the respective switches inserted. The Gamerfingers had their switches soldered in, and since I wanted to do a lot of testing & didn’t have enough space for electrical engineering work, I went with the Crowns. They’re also only intended to be used with Cherry MX Silver switches, and this ended up causing trouble with any switches that had larger actuation distances (the MX Silver has a 1.2 mm actuation distance, and in my testing, any distance longer than 1.5mm didn’t trigger consistently). I ended up going with Kailh Speed Navy switches.
After all this testing, I had a lot of extra buttons and switches. I figured, hey, I might as well take this opportunity to just get a stick housing / PCB, and build an entire custom stick. So I did.
I also ended up having enough extra buttons left over to also replace all the buttons on my old Mayflash stick.
I have too many arcade sticks now.