Slik Stik Slickness

The Suncom Slik Stik is my all time favorite joystick. I first picked up one of these at Toys R Us back in the day when they were selling Commodore 64 hardware and software. My Atari joystick was on its last leg, so I needed to find a replacement. The $4.85 price was right, and the packaging promised higher scores and better feel. OK, I believe that.

Sure enough, they weren’t lying. The short throw and high spring rate made it super responsive, and provided excellent tactile feedback. The first time I tried it, I doubled my previous high score in Centipede. Of course, it wouldn’t last. The Slik Stik has one big achilles heel. After a few months of use it becomes very sloppy. I attribute this to the rubber losing its spring due to flexing. This wasn’t a problem back when they were still being sold. They were cheap enough to replace every few months.

Unfortunately these joysticks are no longer being sold, and I didn’t have the foresight to stock up on them when they were. So now I’m stuck with several joysticks that, in their current state, are really no better than the Atari joysticks that I have. Well thanks to one extremely dishonest Ebay seller, I acquired a “like new” Slik Stik that arrived with the bottom half of the joystick shaft broken off inside. This gave me the opportunity to tear one down, and see how it was made.

I often wondered about exactly how they manufactured the Slik Stik. There really is no way to remove the shaft from the joystick base. The red knob on the top of the shaft doesn’t unscrew, and the contact ball at the other end is larger than the hole. It appears that they somehow molded it all together around the base.

With the bottom half of the shaft broken off well up inside of the rubber surround, I was able to compress the grommet, and tried pushing it out with a screwdriver. Unfortunately I tore the grommet off in the process. This however led to a discovery. I found some numbers that I never noticed before on the bottom of the grommet, and decided to plug them into Google. I got a hit on only one of them, TR414, and when I looked it up I was surprised and amused to find that it is the part number of a valve stem for an automotive tire. OK, seriously? Time to hop in the car and head to Autozone.

I picked up a couple of TR414 valve stems and brought them back home. It turned out that the valve stem looked practically identical to the joystick shaft assembly, so I tried installing it into the joystick base. Lo and behold it fit perfectly.

At this point I’m just starting to decide what to do with this newfound knowledge. I’m definitely going to try using one of these valve stems to fix my Ebay special, but I’m also thinking that this may be a way to rejuvenate my other Slik Stik joysticks. That would be really slick. Stay tuned for more on this.