Electric Bikes - Checking for a bad connection (ping batt)

Hello everyone!
I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions of steps to take to check for a bad connection. I ride my bike about 23 miles to work charge it, and 23 miles back. I have a 36v 20ah lifepo4 ping battery and peddle moderately almost the whole way. Lately, my bike hasn't had the power it should. My speed has been less, and the last time I rode it, my battery cut out after about 12 miles. I unplugged my battery from my controller and plugged it back in. No power. Peddled for a couple blocks, and tried it again, power. There was still enough juice to get me the remaining 11 miles home. There was also a lot more torque once I got it going the second time. Can anyone clue me in on what to look for? I'm a little scared of screwing something up taking apart my battery without any bit of advice.

Contact Ping directly. He answers his emails regularly.

your Ping pack is made up of a bunch of cells wired in parallel and series.

To get a "36V" pack you'll have 12 series sets of cells. (3 rated-volts per set; actual volts during normal use will start at 3.6 and gradually drop to about 2.8 when the battery is nearly used up).

Ping's old cells were 5 amp hours, new cells are 4 amp hours.

Each set of cells is 4 or 5 cells, 4 or 5 amp hours per cell. (so the set is 4 cells times 5 amp hours = 20, or 5 cells times 4 amp hours = 20 amp hours ~3 volts). You really can just pull stuff apart and look for wires that are not connected well, once you know what "series" and "parallel" wiring look like. Better to use a voltmeter to check on whether you're seeing the volts you should be seeing (which will tell you about broken connections).

Just be really sure not to make any unintended shortcircuit connections. As an example of what could happen, one guy at endless-sphere.com/forums showed pics of how he vaporized a large hole in his pair of pliers because he unthinkingly created a short-circuit through the pliers.

So I tore my battery open and found the problem right away (I hope). There was a wire holding onto some sort of solder-like block by just a couple threads. I had a fun time getting that soldered back on. Either my soldering iron doesn't get hot enough, or I really suck at soldering. Nothing ever wants to stick with me.
What I saw of the inside connections was not what I expected to see and it's actually a little confusing.
I don't understand how these cells are connected at all.
There is one thing that kinda bothered me too. All of the block bars on top of the cells were laying flat with the cells. The one with the bad connected wire wasn't. Is that something I should be concerned about?
Like I said, I don't understand how these are working. They are different then every other battery I have ever used or seen.
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b96/reptedjess/ebike/1020082053.jpg

this is how your battery's connected, except with more cells.