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View topic - Any tips for refurbing / restoring control pads?

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  • Joined: 06 Mar 2022
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Any tips for refurbing / restoring control pads?
Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:26 pm
I have two second hand control pads purchased from CeX here in the UK.

I cleaned them up cosmetically when I bought them, took everything apart and applied some light abrasion to the tracks under the push buttons and managed to get all contacts working.

However I noticed when playing games they are not really as responsive as I would have hoped. At first I wondered whether my homebrew hardware was just reading the ports a bit slowly, but then I tried using an old Megadrive controller and wow - what a difference. Playing Xenon 2 with the MD controller vs. the SMS controllers is like playing on a different console!

So my conclusion is that I'm not getting reliable contact on at least the two fire buttons, possibly also on the D pad.

Has anyone got any war stories of improving or restoring original control pads? Either techniques for cleaning the existing mechanics or maybe replacing the conductive rubber parts or something like that?
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:07 pm
Clean the PCB, and rub the carbon pads on a bit of paper to scrub off some of the surface and leave lovely conductive carbon exposed.
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:15 pm
Thanks for the tip Maxim.

A3 or A4 paper? :)
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:20 pm
A4, 80gsm, copier paper not inkjet. Orient it north-south and use the rougher of the two sides. Make sure to stand on one leg and don’t blink during the process.

If the rubber is degraded then it might be contributing, but replacement rubber isn’t available as far as I know. Even at its best, the SMS pad is not as nice as the Mega Drive.
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:38 pm
Haha.

You can definitely get both conductive rubber discs of all different shapes and sizes as well as various rubber gaskets complete with conductive discs installed from the usual online sources; but I didn't really want to muck about buying random crap off ebay until I had a go at cleaning the originals.

I tried the paper trick, definitely feels good - and has left some incredibly dirty skidmarks on my north-south oriented paper which I presume is a good sign.

Will put it through the Xenon 2 test later and report back...
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:44 pm
@maxim thanks so much, that worked better than I could possibly imagined!

Action buttons now feel like they're working as rapidly as the MD controller. D-pad not noticeably improved, but I put that down to the design of the SMS pad itself which as you say does leave a bit to be desired.
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Post Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 7:11 am
You can buy special condictive silver paint designed exactly for repairing rubber pads in controllers/keyboards. I used it on my SC-3000 and it works great. No amount of cleaning or rubbing on north to south orientated paper would make it work properly. I also found a carbon glue that was meant for repairing broken tracks on pcbs that worked well too. That was water based and took a lot longer to dry though.
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Post Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:15 am
wasup wrote
You can buy special condictive silver paint designed exactly for repairing rubber pads in controllers/keyboards.


Oh that’s very interesting, thanks will look into that!

For this controller at least the paper rubbing seemed to do the trick, but the second controller I have was much worse than the first so perhaps when I turn my attention to that it’ll need something more serious.
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Post Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 11:54 pm
Additional suggestions can be found here
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