Hori Hayabusa and Hayabusa Silent Optical Joysticks

I was debating about even making a post about this because for some reason I felt like that this isn't entirely engineering related, but on the other hand it's also one of my hobbies. So let me lay out some of the details and we can see if this is useful to anyone else.

About four months ago(I think, I can't remember exactly) I purchased a Hori Hayabusa joystick and it works pretty well. It's somewhere inline with the JLF. This isn't really a review of the joystick. Anyways, a wonderful person known as Kowal through Shoryuken forums came up with a fantastic octagonal restrictor gate.

Hori Hayabusa Original w/ Kowal Octo Gate

This is what the original Hayabusa looks like with the restrictor gate removed. I'm holding up the Kowal octagonal gate right above it. There's nothing entirely too special about it other than it's just something different than the very commonly used Sanwa JLF joystick.

However, I'm posting it to bring attention to the fact that the silent optical Hayabusa is... ehh.. I don't want to say significantly different, but it is different enough to prevent swapping restrictor gates.

The Hori Silent Optical Hayabusa joystick shown on the left with it's cover off is just different enough to make things complicated. It's restrictor gate on the right has latches and mounting holes that are different enough that swapping gates out is complicated.

It isn't however impossible, because there is sort of a quick destructo-modification that you can do to put the Kowal gate, but it requires destroying the original gate and at the time of this post there isn't a way to purchase a backup if you super ruin the original. Overall that sounds like a bad idea.

I also don't really know how effective the destructo-mod is so I'm reluctant to attempt it until there's a better fall back plan. I did think it was kind of interesting upon finding this out, my initial thought was... well, I suppose I could try to CNC something out of aluminum or polycarbonate. If no one comes out with a better solution, I will come back to this to idea, but currently I'm working on some more interesting projects. So I expect to have some more quality posts here in the new future. The summer has not been completely wasted.