Renovating A Classic

Wanted to share a great story about how I was able to renovate and bring new life to a classic old flashlight recently! Forum member sween1911 put a Nitecore D20 up for sale that essentially had a fried driver in it. Vinh had attempted to modify/fix this driver to no avail so sween decided to put the light up for sale at a great price so someone could purchase it and hopefully fix it up and get it working again. Here is the original sale thread for the light. Nitecore D20 Sale Thread I want to say thanks to him for providing an awesome light for sale, exactly as described, that I could work on/fix and give a good home!

After receiving the light I began to work on it to see what I could do. I'm pretty familiar now with the PD lights by Nitecore and began working on the circuit. Unfortunately it was too far gone to salvage so I had to scrap the original circuit board and find a replacement. I settled on a 15mm circuit board (these are hard to find btw!) that would provide the correct boost voltage I needed with a 2AA setup. In order to get it to work I had to make several modifications to the light. I had to solder a small brass button contact onto the circuit board that would be just large enough to make contact with the batteries but not too long that it would jam the piston from moving. This was actually quite difficult to find the correct size needed. In addition the ring which activates as the "switch" needed to be slightly thicker. The easiest route to solve this was for me to add some solder and troubleshoot it until it was just thick enough with the extra solder. This allowed the light to operate as a twist on/off while also giving the PD switch the option to provide momentary on/switch modes from off. The end result is I have a light producing 300+ lumens from 2AA batteries, a low mode of about 80 lumens and then a strobe. Here is a quick beamshot, I put an XP-L HI emitter in there so throw is decent. I thought about trying a 14500 cell in there with a dummy cell to see what the result will be, that may be a future project. Also considered putting a direct drive module in there and running two 14500 batteries and a high power emitter that would give close to 1000 lumens but may save this for a future project. Here is a beamshot below which gives a good idea of the decent tint and smooth beam pattern, much better than a stock D20 by far.



And here is the emitter, XP-L HI at 4500k.

Thanks for sharing, snowlover91!

Awesome buddy!

So glad it went on to live again and still maintain multiple modes. That light was so cool and solid, it was a shame to have it sit in my parts bin.

Fantastic work! Can you put up a picture of what the business end of the light looks like with the new emitter? I'm loving that creamy white beamshot.

I'll definitely get a pic of the emitter in it as well as the modifications I had to make on the circuit/ring area to get it working. I'm considering also in the future getting a FET direct driver and running something like an XHP50 or similar LED with 2 14500 batteries as the power source or using the current one with a 14500 and a dummy cell to further increase output.

I'll get some pics of the LED up tonight, any other requests? I can take a few of the light also and the new circuit setup.

I'd love to see how the new circuit is setup.

My camera died as I was trying to take pictures so I wasn't able to get pics of the light and everything else. However here is an additional picture showing the XP-L HI emitter in the D20.

Sa-WEET!