Solid Metal Joy Con By WULFF DEN

(bright upbeat music) - You've seen aftermarket joy-cons shells before, they're nothing new. They're widely available on Amazon and usually pretty cheap. But not these. These are machined out of two solid pieces of aluminum. These are like pieces of jewelry for your switch. I swore off doing joy-con shell swaps because it's kind of a nightmare project, a lot could go wrong.

But I had to try these. These are from Boxy Pixel and they're a beaut, but, well, I'm sure by the end of this you'll be able to figure out if it's worth it for you. (upbeat bass music) This video is sponsored by Trade Coffee. (light upbeat music) (coughing) You should probably upgrade your coffee game a little bit. Discover new coffees from the nation's best local roasters and have them shipped right to your door.

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I've been using Trade for about a year now. I love trying all new and different types of coffee. I hate ordering it myself though, because I always forget, and then I gotta go like a week without coffee. With Trade I get coffee from all over the country when I need it, and I don't even have to think about it. Right now if you click the link in the description below you'll get 50% off your first bag of Trade Coffee.

Just take their quiz, click that link, enter code WULFFDEN50, and you'll get 50% off your first bag. And thank you Trade for helping support this channel and also be in my supplier for the past year-ish. So this caught my attention only after Boxy Pixel came out with their Game Boy Advance SP Unhinged kit. I thought about doing that for myself until I saw a couple of YouTube videos on it and said that. But after perusing their website I saw a Nintendo switch category, a Nintendo switch.

That's like my thing. So I bought two sets of shells and two sets of buttons. They come in regular silver, black, and purple. I just got the regular silver and black ones because I wanted them to look good on my red switch, and also because I had to cut costs somewhere, I couldn't get all of them. These things are expensive.

These shells are $100 for each pair. And that's the sale price. And the buttons are an additional $22 optional add-on, but it's not really optional, because these things have a deep head cutout. And it's not like deep heads are some generic size, you have to get the deep head that's going to fit inside of this deep head cutout, so you're pretty much forced to by their buttons. Boxy Pixel will put these on a brand new set of joy-cons for you, but that service costs an additional $148, bringing the grand total without tax or shipping or anything up to $270.

Just for one pair of joy-cons. Yeah, this video is not gonna do that good. I ordered some brand new joy-cons with this project, but they never came, or worst case scenario, I accidentally threw them out with all of the boxes that I had from last week's video. So I borrowed some joy-cons for this video. Hopefully I could order some off of eBay and have them come by the time my roommate finds out.

Otherwise he's just gonna get a brand new pair of $100 joy-cons. Look, I'm not the bad guy here. I've done shell swaps before, I did these gold ones for my fammy calm colored switch, a long time ago. These were a bitch. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, doing shell swaps is a bitch and a half.

So that experience made me seriously dread doing this all over again. But honestly, in the end, it wasn't that bad. It did go significantly more smoothly this time around than it did when I did these. The shell swap me about four hours for the four joy-cons, shave off one hour for the fact that I was streaming and talking to chat and stuff. The first of the four joy-con that I did took around two hours on its own.

But after I got all the kinks worked out on that one the rest were a breeze. I stripped the very first screw that I tried to unscrew, but I improvised. All is going great so far guys. So literally just holding the case together. I'm a little worried about this other screw, 'cause I just got ripped off.

Whoo, all right, next step. iFixit has an okay tear down guide, but the problems with a lot of the tear down guides that I saw was that they either just show you how to do one joy-con, or they don't show you the reassembly process, and sometimes you just wanna see how a guy got a ribbon cable to plug back in. Fetching Tech has a great tutorial that shows a lot more of the process. After I completely stripped down and reassembled the first joy-con, I realized that there was a lot that I could have just left together, there was a lot of corners I could've cut. For example, there's a middle piece in the joy-con that holds the battery and the shoulder buttons.

You can kind of see it from the outside if you look at the top, this gray line right here. I'm glad I decided to do this with gray joy-cons, otherwise, if they were colored, that spot would look real weird. It's recommended that you remove all of the ribbon cables because they are very delicate and very important. But if you're very careful, you can cut some corners if you leave a lot of them connected. So after it was all done, they all work perfectly fine, except not so much for the first one that I did.

It's a little rough slotting it into the switch, and also the plus button doesn't work. I think the membrane is misaligned or something. It's an easy fix I'm sure, but I'm lazy. Otherwise all the buttons feel really good. I purposely did the silver ones second because I knew those would be the ones I would like the most.

But honestly they both look really good on my red switch. The black ones look great from behind because it compliments the random black kickstand. They feel pretty awesome. It's nice and solid in your hand, like you're holding a MacBook or a sharp iPad or something. These joy-cons are significantly heavier about 22 grams heavier, and the switch itself with both joy-cons on, feels meteor.

But it's not gonna break your wrists, they're still very tiny. And it will still fit in a satisfied grip version too, not the version one, and it actually says that on the Boxy Pixel website. Believe it or not, these things also will fit in a joy-con grip, although I guess that shouldn't be too much of a surprise, 'cause they're the same shape and size of a regular joy-con. Even though these use the same membranes as the original joy-cons, the buttons feel awesome. Something about the rigidity of the aluminum makes them feel more cliquey and more solid.

And this D pad feels fantastic. You have to be real careful with positioning the membrane when you're reassembling this joy-con, my black ones have pretty loose feeling buttons and the deep head isn't as cliquey. And it's because I wasn't careful when reassembling that. But my aluminum ones feel amazing. Again, this has nothing to do with the quality of the shells themselves and everything to do with how I put them back together.

I sucked when I was putting the black ones together, and by the time I got to the silver ones I was a goddam like pro. Since these are made from real aluminum, one might think that it would have an effect on the joy-con's wireless connection. I haven't personally noticed any significant effects on the wireless signal strength, and motion controls work just fine too. There is apparently a problem with Amiibo functionality though. The aluminum interferes with the NFC signal enough to render it completely useless, and enough for their website to say that it doesn't recognize NFC.

But like, when was the last time you used an Amiibo? And I mean, like actually used an Amiibo, and not just bought it, put it on your shelf. So the last part of the modification that I did, was I used the joy-cons toolkit software to change the firmware of the joy-con to reflect the new color that it has. So when it gets slotted into the switch, the correct color will show up. That way if you have multiple joy-cons connected you won't get it confused with a random gray pair. On screen now are the colors that I used.

Gotta make sure the buttons are a different color or else it'll just look like a black or white blob. After all that, I actually really like these joy-cons, and the black ones are really cool too. Nintendo doesn't currently make black joy-cons. They look pretty cool on a regular old black switch. It matches is the black metal of the back plate, very well for an all blacked out Nintendo switch.

And now I'm pretty sure MKBHD would love the way it looks on my red switch. But I love the look of the silver ones. It really drives home the fact that these are made from aluminum. It makes the switch feel like a premium piece of tech. And of course you could use sweet joy-cons combinations with these as well, mix and match with whatever else you have.

Now, is this worth it for you? Probably not. I don't think if I ever would've spent the what ended up being $250 on these things if it wasn't for a video. But, now that I have I have them and I went through all that stuff, these are really awesome. This is a premium product that isn't gonna be for everybody, and it requires a significant amount of work on your end. So if you have the money, like to tinker, have an extra pair of joy-con laying around and use the Nintendo switch enough to justify all of this, then maybe this is worth it for you.

It's a very niche product, but there's no denying that the end result is very pretty. I think for sure these silver ones will be the pair that live on my switch from now on. Just, don't be surprised if you don't see them in a thumbnail or something. I typically like to use a more recognizable stock switch that more people have. But just know that when I'm playing this off camera or it's sitting in my dock, these will be the joy-cons I'm using.

That is probably until those Zelda ones come out, baby. What do you guys think about these Boxy Pixel aluminum joy-cons? do you think these are worth it for you? Do you think it's just way too much money and work? Do you think I'm a big fat bitch, and it's really not that hard to do a shell swab? Leave in the comments below, add me on Twitter, ain't all this other social media garbage. You're wrong. And also don't forget to check out Trade, thank you very much for sponsoring this video. Usually sponsors will give me like a free trial to their stuff to like try it out and whatever, Trade I pay for myself, because it is that damn good.

If you've been subscribed for a while and you miss the comic book videos here on this channel, well, you're in luck. Because Will just uploaded his very first video since leaving this channel, up his own personal channel about Zack Snyder's Justice League. If you've been here for a while, you know he's been talking about that forever, so, this is a very exciting time. Even if you don't care about Justice League, but you like this channel, please go over there and click that subscribe button, it would mean a lot to the both of us. But as always the most important thing that you could do to help support this channel right here is just subscribe and turn on those notifications so you know when these videos go live and you can be here for them and it helps the algorithm and whatnot.

And share this video with a friend, a friend who maybe has done joy-cons shell swaps before and you wanna show them how cool these look. Thank you very much. You have yourself a very good week. Yeah, aha, you don't say.

Source : WULFF DEN