Sanwa 4 way SQUARE restrictor gate / replacement part

thingiverse

I spent an hour scouring Google for a replacement SQUARE 4-way restrictor gate for a Sanwa joystick that had broken on me. I managed to hack together a quick fix by remixing the diamond-shaped gate into a square one. To my astonishment, not a single square replacement gate was available anywhere for Sanwa joysticks. There were countless octagonal and circular options, as well as diamond-shaped ones, but no standard square gates. It's mind-boggling that nobody has ever needed to replace their gate quickly before. I hope this hack will be useful to someone. I printed the new gate with 4 walls and 4 top/bottom layers for extra strength, anticipating it would take a lot of abuse over its lifetime. The print took around an hour at 45mm/s with a .20mm layer height. For some reason, my example print had a weird triangle pattern on top that I couldn't explain, but when I sliced the model again, it was gone. The new gate snaps perfectly into place under the joystick and can be removed without damaging the connecting parts. Unfortunately, Thingiverse isn't displaying the images uploaded to this file, so here are some Imagr links instead: