I had purchased a Nintendo Switch on launch day and played it quite heavily ever since. The Joy-Cons had developed the typical stick drift issue over time, so I wanted to replace the sticks. I had studied the various iFixit guides on the Joy-Cons and also ordered the replacement sticks from the iFixit store.
Since there would be no point in me just writing out the steps involved (the iFixit guides would invariably function better as guides in any case), I might as well recall the funny incidents from the repair. From the get-go, I struggled mightily with some of the tri-wing screws holding the Joy-Cons together. I had to resort to using a hammer to drive the bit into the screw head to gain any leverage. To my amusement, this worked quite well.
I started with the right Joy-Con, as it is the more complex one. After the hammer incident, the next issue presented itself in reassembly. I simply couldn't get one of the connectors back in place. Given that this was for the IR camera that is never really used anywhere, I ended up giving up and leaving it disconnected. A shame, especially since it didn't exactly need to be removed in the first place…
After finishing the right Joy-Con, the left one was a breeze in comparison, and the whole process went without much issue.
In the end, I was left with a fully functional pair of Joy-Cons, apart from the IR camera, and the drift was gone.
This post was retroactively compiled on 2024-01-15 from a long since privated YouTube video. All the images are still frames from the video.