I owe a lot of my arcade stick-making abilities to my previous experience with MAME cabinets and the first few people I personally saw make one player sticks: Byrdo, Timoe and Kaytrim.
Using some of their creations as a visual guide, last year I came up with a few ideas of my own. The first arcade stick I ever made was the "Ivy" based on Ivy from the Soul Calibur series. I used some official Ivy art that appeared on the net well before Soul Calibur IV came out.
I wanted to try something different for materials, I had seen many types of hardwoods used on arcade sticks but I had never seen a quilted maple one. Especially a quilted maple one with a "PRS" or Paul Reed Smith style guitar finish. I looked around the internet and found many guides for achieving this finish. This guide in particular I found pretty helpful.
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I bought a hacked Xbox 360 controller from my friend HarumaN at the arcadecontrols.com forums and built the stick with 7/8" thick wood I bought off ebay.
Normally it's good to keep the arcade stick thin as possible, but for this one and a few future ones 1) I liked the particular wood so I wanted to see some more of it and 2) In some cases I wanted to use some longer Happ/Ultralux buttons than the Seimitsu/Sanwa ones.
I stained the wood once with Transfast dye, then sanded it back down lightly just to take the sye off the "raised" parts of the wood. The dye stayed in the grain areas making them even darker when the second coat of dye was applied.
I illuminated these clear Seimitsu purple "skeleton" buttons with a few leds shining under them. You can also place smaller leds inside each button, but I found that a few leds shining up from the bottom of the case illuminated the buttons fine. Especially since these buttons are not transparent in the middle. HarumaN soldered the 5volt line coming off the Xbox 360 controller to power the leds and left the wires for the rumble motors on so I attached some red leds to these and used a red translucent Wico button as the Xbox guide button which I wired to a red led as well (it looks orange in the pic but it's quite red when lit). The result is when you play games that rumble the bottom of the case flashes with some red leds.
Often times, Timoe especially when he makes sticks will place clear plexiglass on the bottom so you can see the internals of the stick. I did the same here but I used some purple transparent plexi and it has kind of an "ambilight" effect hehe when the button leds are lit and the rumble leds flash.
I was pretty happy with the results, the quilted maple has a great 3D effect that really pops when the light hits it just so.
I placed some skeleton and ivy leaf graphics inside the Seimitsu buttons to go along with the sort of gothic theme. I found these sticks especially useful for 1) Playing Xbox 360 and Live Arcade games that support the controls 2) Playing PC games and emulators that support the controls 3) Using it as a 2,3,4 player option on a MAME arcade cabinet 4) Letting out some creative expression, I've found it fun thinking up a style or theme or paying homage to a certain game through an arcade stick.
