marooneypilot

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My M20K has started to develop a trim problem and I'm having a hard time troubleshooting it. When in flight, I will intermittently experience an uncommanded trim up. My first thought was that this was runaway electric trim, but I don't think this is it because turning off the electric trim switch, and pulling the auto-pilot circuit breaker does not halt the issue. Also, the actual symptom is pretty sporadic. It won't just smoothly roll the wheel backwards, but rather it will kind of slip backwards in fits and starts. Sometimes I can go for a long while and the trim behaves itself, other times I find myself fighting it the whole flight. The autopilot doesn't seem to have any problem holding altitude when engaged, and if I either manually trim or use electric trim then the system behaves as expected. So I find this a real nuisance more than a safety of flight issue, although I do find myself having to leave my hand on the trim wheel a lot more than I should. I had them look at this during the last annual and Dugosh was not able to find anything wrong. They also didn't experience the problem on their test flight. Any ideas on how to figure this out?

I put in about half a gallon today then flipped on the master. Lo and behold the gauge reads 0.6 gal. Turning on the pump it starts priming. A couple of quick squirts from the windshield pumps and there is fluid coming out where it should be. A few minutes later I have fluid dripping from the leading edges. I guess the gauge just isn't reliable with an empty tank.

Just so everyone knows, we weren't flying in known ice, we were flying on a cold day, in a very thin layer through which we could see blue sky above and the ground below. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to try running the TKS in a low-risk environment with obvious outs. I'm pretty risk-averse when it comes to this sort of thing.

Thanks Zach - that's what I initially thought, but it was running properly for a while. We could see fluid weeping all along the wings and the light was solid on, but then fluid stopped flowing and the lights on the panel went back to the flickering-priming indication. I left it in this state for a good 15-20 minutes before giving up and saving the pump.

Yeah, topping it off is what I'm thinking. The magical accumulation of fluid on the gauge is what has me thinking it's unreliable.

This weekend I gave the TKS system a try. Flipping to Anti-Ice it primed for a few minutes as expected then we could see fluid weeping from all the expected points. After about 15-20 minutes the system indicated it was priming again, fluid stopped flowing and we were basically done with that. However, the system still indicated that it has 1.0 Gal of fluid on the digital readout. I'm not getting a high-pressure light. I'm wondering if I'm out of fluid and it's just misreporting by a whole gallon? I do see a lot of fluctuations in the reported fluid level as the plane warms up on a trip (typically we "start" a trip with 0.7 Gal and end it with 1.2). Theories appreciated.

I got this: 1979 M20K, with a -LB, Airflow intercooler, Merlyn, Aspen, TKS and several other toys (I'm pretty giddy!). It will be based at KEDC. Should suit my usual mission of Angel Flights and statewide search of the best BBQ in Texas. I'm new to the board, but I've been flying about 5 years and 400 hours. IR to get the most from this bird, and planning to knock out my commercial in the next few months. David