You may remember I recently asked about some items at Lizard Lick Amusement for modification and retrofit of some U360s I was planning on getting, which I did. The items were purple (officially dark blue) ball tops to replace the stock reds, and the Sanwa round and octagonal restrictors. I can officially say that the octagonal restrictor will not work without modification - the flanges are in the way, and anyway the screw holes are off - which is likely why Ultimarc fabbed their own.

The round restictor is indeed the same one so yes it works.
But this isn't all there is to the tale. How was I going to accomodate not having the special hardware Ultimarc includes in the restrictor kits? I went and removed the PCB and the PCB mounting brackets from one of the sticks and placed the restrictor on the underside of the stick base - and then carefully slid the brackets underneath it. The distance was the same so it should work, right? I couldn't know for sure because the screws that attach the brackets to the base were too short for the added depth of the restrictor. Hardware store run, of course.

I don't remember the measurments of those screws, but they're metric and I just figured about twice as long. The new ones were phillips head, but otherwise worked just fine. Bonus.

Okay, nice. But I had some other ideas, too. You see, I like a REALLY short throw on sticks, and I had a feeling the restrictor wasn't going to be enough for my preference, particularly after mounting it and feeling the mile-long throw the stick had, stock. (I also figured the stock shaft would be too short for my wood panel, so opted for the extra long shaft from Ultimarc. A wise choice...unless you like a really stumpy stick.)
That was the next thing I went to the hardware store for - though I was casual about it because I didn't really expect to find anything that would work. The question first is, how do you close the gap? Well, after inspecting the stick mechanism and all, I realised I could a) fab a new actuator the fit the spring (essentially, it helps retain the spring) and cylindrical - ie: the same diameter as the upper part of the actuator - or, b) find something that would fit over the lower part. 'b' getting satisfied means it gets done now, and it turned out to be some fairly hard tubing that I had to rather grossly cut evenly and then use some pliers to press it over the bottom.



Now to hook it up and test it. Well almost. I'll give the results of the restrictor first. I was worried about two things. Yes, the travel relative to sensing - but first in my mind was actually whether the material would bind against the restrictor. Fortunately, the tubings hard enough so there's no issue there. Now for overall performance: though 4-way was fine, the short travel requires the '8-way easy diagonals' for 8-way.
Okay, what's left? Initially, I was pretty leary about the spring resistance as there almost isn't any with the stock spring. But then I thought, well maybe it'll just mean it's super easy to control! Yes, too easy in a way. See, I have this tendency in some games to let off the stick pretty sharply. With my P360s there's not issue because the spring is pretty tight and forces the stick to center. Not so here, and occasionally it would go over into the other direction - like say in Donkey Kong and suddenly I'm facing away from a barrel. Um, yeah.
Last item at the hardware store was a spring. 'But, they're only three bucks from Ultimarc (or Divemaster)', you might say. I prefer to think of myself as economic. This sometimes gets me into trouble where the effort is far more than the savings in cash - but I was already at the store so hey. And what do I find??

A little longer, but despite it being (quite a bit) tighter it compessed just fine. Ah yes, much nicer. And here's the thing all together.

So far, as I re-fitted the unmounted one, I've just tested it holding it in my hand and it's performed well. Pretty tight Pac-Man and Bubbles, respectively. Since then, I've been creating this thread (which took me I think more than two hours - I can't remember now, it was so full of headaches - first and last time I tell ya), and will soon go and refit the mounted stick and test some more, but I'm anticipating some nice playing. Oh, and all the parts for both sticks cost me a little over three bucks. Each restrictor is $4.95 at Lizard Lick, so I saved a few bucks at least.