To anyone who has made or modified a arcade stick....

I haven't opened the controller up and looked at the PCB, yet. I might do it tomorrow. But, would it be easy to connect the buttons from the stick to the PCB?

 

I don't have a dremel either, I used a cone shaped reamer drill bit in a cordless screwgun/drill. i used a saber saw to trim the base on the sanwa. i did have to cut a hole in the bottom of chassis for the stick to move freely.

the stick feels much better.
going from 4 way to 8 way seemed to be the biggest difference, you could probably shim the switches in the stock stick and get some improvement out of it. they seemed loose when i pulled it out. this would be something to check

it's hard to say how much improvement it made stick wise as I had never played with one before. i did start getting faster times right away and it feels a lot tighter. I went from S2 to S5 pretty quick but i was totally new to ARS also.

as for the buttons, I lost a button on the fighting stick within about 2 weeks. the new buttons are very responsive, but that doesn't really affect performance so much as feeling.