Cable Strain Reliefs

I had my grandson over last night and today. As usual, when he's over, he likes to play lots of games from my quite large collection. Long story short: He wanted to play racers on the Xbox platform, and I pulled out an original Microsoft duke controller, along with a Pelican brand 3rd party controller. We were in the midst of one game, and he said he was unable to control his car. I paused, grabbed the Pelican controller he was using, and sure enough no buttons or directional inputs were registering. Since it worked fine to start the game, I suspected a dead short or solder joint loose inside. Took it apart, saw nothing out of the ordinary (other than a cracked controller housing from some serious rough play by the previous owner) and began playing with the strain relief where the cable enters the controller housing. Sure enough, wiggling the cable at that point registered button pushes sometimes and other times not. So...after cutting the rubber strain relief off the cable, and stripping back a couple inches of the outer cable sheathing, the problem became evident. There is a braided grounding strand that surrounds the other internal wires in many Xbox controllers, and some kids that gave this one to Goodwill must have literally bent the cable back and forth at the strain relief until the braiding was nearly completely separated at that point. Wow, these kids must have been really abusive brats. After soldering a patch wire across the broken braiding and wrapping the repaired section with electrician's tape, problem was solved. I should point out that this is the second Xbox controller that I have ever had to do strain relief related repair to. With that in mind, it seems to me that Nintendo and Sony were wise in their strain relief design, and Microsoft's flexible rubber design is faulty. These can be fixed, as I have now done twice, but it amazes me to see the amount of abuse some spoiled brats put their games and systems through.

At least you were able to get it fixed! It is remarkable how much abuse these things have to take. I'm sure the previous owner would have just thrown them out.

They did. They gave them to Goodwill. I usually come down on people who give defective things to charity thrifts, except when it comes to video gaming items. I guess I consider myself to be a preservationist, and love repairing stuff that might have gone to the landfill. More gaming goods left for future generations.

I only have an after market Xbox controller and it has not lived up to expectations. It just seems cheap. Which it really was not when I bought the thing.