Trolling Motor Problems

[Shake n' Bake]

Hi all. I have a foot controlled trolling motor that is giving me some issues. While in use sometimes it will stop working and when I press the button to make it go or put it in continuous mode there is a crackling noise coming from the foot pedal. When this happens I try and make it work again by changing the speed, lifting the unit out of the bracket and then dropping it back in,turning it on and off, and jiggling/moving the foot pedal/cable around. So far every time it has started working again properly after doing some combination of these things. There are two things I can think of that may or may not be causing the issue one is that the motor does not completely lock into the mounting bracket when in the deployed mode but does come very close, the other is that I didn't use any kind of nut/wingnut to attach the battery cables to the battery terminal. Thanks for any advice/info.