Forced Joy-Con customization

A while ago, my Nintendo Switch fell off the table, full on the right Joy-Con. Luckily, my Switch had no damage, but the Joy-Con was torn off the rail. The brown attachment strips (they probably have a more technical name) seemed still intact and I figured the controller would still work if I could get the rail reattached to the rest of the controller.

Since the costs for repairing a Joy-Con are almost as high as buying a new one, I decided I might as well try it for myself. All I needed to do was put the rail with the brown strips back into the controller. How hard could it be?

Tri-wing

I soon found out that Nintendo really doesn’t want you to open a Joy-Con. They use the world’s tiniest screws and on top of that not even ordinary crosshead screws! No, they use tri-wing screws so you are forced to buy a special tri-point screwdriver.

So first, I went to the amazing website of iFixit to check what I needed and bought the required screwdriver from that famous Chinese website which sells everything for practically nothing. I only got two out of the four screws out. It probably would have been a better idea to spend more money on a higher quality screwdriver.

My patience, however, was gone by that time so I demolished the backside of the Joy-Con shell to get the remaining two screws out. I figured it was a better idea to first check if the reattachment of the rail worked before doing anything else.

The fix

This is what it looked like by that time. Nintendo probably thought that at this point, it didn’t matter anymore so they used normal crosshead screws inside.

I reattached the rail according to iFixit’s tutorial and guess what? It worked!

Now, all I needed was a new backside for the Joy-Con. To the Chinese webshop again! And there I bought this (see how small the screws are?):

Fixed!

I was getting the hang of assembling and disassembling the Joy-Con. Some parts were missing the first few times so I got a little practice… However! This is the final result: