Can’t find a Nintendo Switch? Just make your own one

I don’t think there’ll ever be a U-turn as brilliant as the one that Nintendo pulled off in 2017. With the Wii U being pretty much the worst thing to hit video games since Oblivion slapped a price tag on horse armour, Nintendo needed to hit a six with their next console offering. And by gum, they did just that. Taking the core idea of the Wii U, merging it with the Nintendo 3DS handheld and creating a console that was equally at home in your living room or in the streets when you were on the go, was a stroke of genius.

With millions of units sold, the Nintendo Switch is a device with no equal in its field. It’s also bloody hard to get your hands on lately, thanks to a combination of national lockdowns, production on new units grinding to a halt and absolute bastards buying all remaining stock so that they can resell them at an inflated price. What do you do, if you can’t find a Switch in the wild? You build your own one.

“After playing New Horizons and hyping it up to my friends, they decided they wanted a Switch,” Reddit user Sarbaaz detailed in his build log (Cheers, Vooks).

They called around to different retailers every day for a week with no luck finding anyone who had one in stock. No one knew when the next shipment would be. This led to an online search like Craigslist, OfferUp, and Ebay. Unfortunately everyone knows the rest. Upwards of $450 to $600 in the Seattle area for a used Switch. Some with and without all the accessories. This enraged me to the point of telling them I could build one cheaper out of spare parts. So they hired me to do just that.

Scouring the net, Sarbaaz spent $199 on the 22 parts needed to put a Switch together. The most expensive part was working OEM Nintendo Switch replacement logic board motherboard, which cost $95 on its own. From there, Sarbaaz patiently waited for the parts to arrive, worked on them slotting all of them into a sturdy package and eventually…A Switch was born! While it did end up costing as much as a regular Switch does, it’s still a heckin’ impressive feat.

Creativity in a time of crisis. I love it!

Last Updated: April 15, 2020