The cardboard sleeve is there to prevent adjacent cells from shorting via their cases, which are connected to cell -ve. Sleeve colour is used by some manufacturers to signify grade of battery, but there is no formal standard. Probably best not to mix colours. Some even advocate using all cells in a battery from the same batch. Many of the eBay listings are for "4/5 sub-C" cells, which are smaller than plain old sub-C, the latter being the ones in the images in the original posting.
Looking at the pack, 3 rows of 5 seems more likely than 2 rows, unless there are sub-C-sized packing pieces in the centre of the pack.
so mine says 2.0ah , ebay has 2.8 and others , would it be an advantage /okay to use higher rated ones , not totaly sure what it means , does it hold a bit more juice?
Any idea what the silver thing is..will it work with other ah batterys
and best way to join the cells ? ebay ones come with a short tab welded on but not long enough , not sure the batt casing would accomodate a bit of wire
It's probably a thermistor. It's a temperature dependent resistor that the charger uses to prevent overcharging. It doesn't care what cells are there. I rebuilt some Dewalt packs, just replacing duff cells. I made sure that I cut the tabs near to the dead cell so that I could overlap and solder. There's often little extra space in the body so you may find that a wire would prevent the case from closing.
yeah thats what im thinking theres no space for wires , just have to hope the tabs are long enough or maybe source some spare tabs, guessing the proper places spot weld the tabs on
You can spot weld the tabs yourself - if you have a spot welder. A guy on another forum made a basic one from a microwave transformer by replacing the secondary winding with 2 turns of heavy copper cable. It did work well.