Hey there, guys!

Half a year ago I bought Logitech ThunderPad gamepad off hands. I never had a gameport gamepad before, and it looked like a good deal. I always digged Logitech stuff, it always felt solid to me. I tested it, played TES Adventures: Redguard with it for some time and, since it was no good for Dethkarz, put it in the desk drawer... I found the thing today and decided to put some work into it!

The gamepad was in overall average condition: no cracks or missing parts, cleaned from the outside, but the plastic was all creaky and the buttons became hard to push, especially the cross. I remember pain in my palms after 2-3 hours of Redguard action and that was one of the reasons I gave up the gamepad at first. First of all, I disassembled the gamepad and cleaned up inside. The plastic button caps turned out to be VERY dirty 😀

The next thing to work on were the rubber buttons. I remember a friend of mine telling me how he boiled a rubber watch bracelet to make it softer, so I decided to follow his footsteps and after a couple of experiments tried to actually boil the buttons. The first 5-minute session of boiling did not change much, however, I was then sure the buttons would not melt. The second 20-minute boiling session made the buttons soft enough, so I tried to assemble and test the gamepad. The buttons were OK, but the cross was still too hard to press on with ease. So I took it apart again and boiled the cross buttons for another 30 minutes to the total one hour! After that, the buttons were a little harder than OK, but I considered the job done.

After fixing the rubber buttons, I took some silicon lubericant I use to prevent doors of my car from freezing and applied a thin layer of it to all the plastic button caps and the perimeter of top and bottom parts ot the gamepad.

Now the gamepad has no cat fur inside, has soft buttons and 90% of the creaks are gone. Moreover, it makes me a little happier again 🤣