Man, I walked through the valley of the shadow of doubt with this one.

What is pictured is an after-market Xbox controller I picked up recently. While I was doing the intake I found its plastic was a bit “sticky” so I gave the controller a bit of a clean, but it started tearing gunk off the plastic, and it all basically went to shit.

I scrubbed and scrubbed and hit it with isopropyl and vinegar and ethanol (ethanol seemed to work best) but ultimately I popped the whole thing open and washed the parts with soap, bicarb soda, and boiling water.

I managed to salvage the controller in the end, but there are still some stains in the slots for the memory cartridge as you can see in the second photo below (for a while there the whole thing looked like that!).

I’m gonna have another go at those stains when my Goo Gone arrives, and maybe give it another hit with the ethanol too.

For a while there I was pretty sure this one was destined for the scrap heap. But after taking it to bits and scrubbing it I put it all back together, and not only did I have no screws left over, all the buttons continued to work too!