Help me decide

I recently got 52 milwaukee 18v batteries donated to me by a local tool repair shop. I am very thankful but they are all nicads. I was told that hey all have at least 1 bad cell and are out of warranty. I opened 1 pack. It has 15 cells series.
should I
1 sell them for 15 dollars shipped as is and use the money to buy better and new batteries like lofepo4
or
2 take the time to extract each cell, test them, revive them if possible, take the good cells and rebuild a custom pack. If i choose this route and unsucessful they will be wasted along with my time and money for supplies. Each cell is rated at 1.2v 2.4ah I would need to wire them at 60s3p or 4p if there is enough good cells.

Either way they will help me get a battery pack for my ebike as I have promised the shop owner.
Second thing is can you guys list the pros and cons of using nicads for my ebike. I will be running 72v 65a Lyen controller and hopefully a crystalyte 5303 rwd. so far i know that they cant be charged in parallel. This means that i have to charge 1 bank of 72v at a time with 4 chargers.

I would go ahead and try to make a battery out of what you got. Nicads are really versatile little buggers. They are heavier than lithium, but they are much more forgiving. I myself use Lipo, but have been amazed by nicads recently. I had a pile of what I thought to be dead nicads. As an experiment I began charging them with my e-bike/hobby chargers that I picked up at Hobby City. It turns out that the nicads were not dead, instead the stock chargers were crap. Good luck either way!

Hmm, even at ten bucks a pack, that's just about enough for a decent lipoly setup. Say 72v 10 ah. Let me see, carry less than 20 pounds of lipoly and have 150 amps avaliable, or....

It's a no brainer to sell em if you can get enough of em sold at $10-$15 a pack. If, on the other hand, the market price for recycled packs is lower then charge em up and run em.

If your goal was to run a bafang on 15 amps, I'd say go for the nicads, you'd have a lifetime supply. But to run a hot controller and huge motor, you need to go for the lipo or a123's. Too bad they aren't lithium packs, that would work!

72v nicad chargers probobally aren't going to be cheap or easy to find. So you are looking at 36v packs, stacks and stacks of em if the cells are small. It'll be a pain unless you just do one ride a week.

if you plan on running 72v on a 5303, you'll need really big fat tires in order to maintain speed on some of the bumpy roads. I can't go faster than about 25 mph without being terrified that I'm going to hit a bump and either lose control or have soemthing break because I don't have fat enough tires. I'd get some schwalbe fat franks if you plan on going pretty fast.

I think I may have to scrap the nicad battery idea. I have calculated the weight of 60 cells (60s1p=72V2.4ah). They weigh almost 10 lbs. 6 SLA at 72v 10ah weight about 43lbs give or take. Nicad at 60s4p (72v 9.6ah 240cells) weighs about 39 lbs. 24 Headway 3.3v 10ah weigh about 16lbs but needs BMS. Lets just say 17lbs. To get the weight down to lifepo4 I would only have to run 60s2p. That only yield 4.8ah

If you wind up with the choice between NiCd and SLA, pick NiCd. Otherwise the lithium is better power-to-weight.

4.8 ah of nicads on an x5 would be doomed. I ruined some 8 ah 5c nicads pretty quick with a 5304, and they were only running on a 20 amp controller!

So you need more nicad for the big controller and big motor. Like all of em. And as you just saw, it will be heavy. The nicads would run a smaller motor on a 20 amp controller fine though, like a 9c or whatever in 4 48v packs paralelled. Or mabye even 3p for bafangs with 15 amp controllers. I doubt 2p would run anything very reliably.

With that big motor and controller, you really do need the high discharge cells, headways at least, but the ideal thing is most likely to be what I am looking into for my race bike.

5s or 6s 5 ah lipo bricks x4 for 72 or 88 volts. the starter pack of 4 looks like between $200-$250 and chargers and stuff at least another $150. Then adding packs in bunches of 4 as I can afford it. C rates of 15 c minimum means even a 5 ah pack could put out enough for my bike, with 45 amp Lyens controlller. You might want to go for 20 c cells or 30's though. 5a won't go far of course, but you can buy more in $250 increments as you get money.