What is the best grease that I can use on battlezone or other plastic controllers?
Why is the repro bellows white soft rubber material that actually rubs off with your finger; but the older one is metal banded on the inside and outside of the grommet shaped belows?
Does anyone sell a better repro for the bellows than Wizz?
For plastic-on-plastic, I use a silicone grease. The stuff I have I found in the plumbing section at Lowes, in a little flat can.
The repro bellows are the way they are because they're cast, not heat molded. The original parts were molded (either injection molded, transfer molded, or compression molded... it's difficult to tell which) using a conventional rubber material. Conventional rubbers require heat and pressure to cure properly, and a primer & adhesive for bonding to the metal (along with careful prep) to achieve a good bond stength. The tooling (molds) and equipment (presses) required to mold such rubber parts is quite expensive. The repros appear to be cast in an open mold. This open mold was made to be rather simple (read: cheap), and may have been made of a wide variety of materials, as no heat is required in the casting process. The material is likely a urethane of some sort, and is cast at room temperature. Note that no real effort appears to have been made to de-gas the material, nor careful pouring, as there is obvious trapped air (bubbles) in them. As the part is of notable different geometry (simple disk vs convoluted shape) and thickness than the original, this likely necessitated a very soft formulation to prevent the effectivey stiffness (in the installed mechanism) from being too great. Anyhow, they're made the way they are to keep non-recurring costs to virtually nil, and be inexpensive to produce in low-volumes. To repro them "properly" would involve significant investment, which would certainly never be recouped.
And no, I'm not aware of any (real) alternatives to NOS and the Wizz repros.
Also I like the Wizz ones, but
www.scammerassholes-wtf?.com/order-bz.html
a different one for more $$$.
Have you not noticed the long, ongoing, repeating, saga of Ram Controls??? There's an entire sub-forum under feedback, if you're curious...