Did a bit of hitbox/fightstick maintenance for the first time recently and it was kinda neat. I picked up a wood cased stickless controller about a month ago, except a week or two back I noticed that because the wood wasn’t finished in any way, it was starting to pick up a bit of oil and dirt from my hands in the spot where I rest them, causing the wood to discolor. So I spent a few days applying layers of linseed oil to the case to try and protect the wood.
Except after that, I realized that some of the buttons were starting to stick because the oil had left residue on them. So I opened the case up, removed the button caps, and thoroughly washed them. Except in the process of disconnecting the buttons, I broke the connecting wires on a couple. So had an additional step there to fix those. One just popped back into place, but another I had to slice open a small bit of the protective rubber casing on an adjacent wire to expose its copper and splice the two wires together. After that it was just a bit of trial and error of getting all the buttons retired back to the proper inputs.
It was definitely a little stressful at points, especially when I was dealing with the wiring since that sort of thing I haven’t done much with before, but I was able to get some advice from local fgc folks in discord which helped a lot. And in the end it wound up being a pretty rewarding feeling project? I feel like I tend to lose patience pretty quickly with working with things with my hands that involve fine detail, and this was a nice way to dive into some of that with “have a working controller again” as pretty strong motivation to stick with it. And it’s cool coming away from it with some slightly improved skills with electronics and a bit more confidence in being able to do more of this sort of maintenance in the future if I need to.