[TowerTalk] A4S 30/40 add on

[Gene Bigham]

I recently purchased used, from a pile of aluminum antenna parts, a Cushcraft A4S I believe it to be as it has the extra 10 meter element.  This antenna also has the 30/40 meter add on with the heavy duty center insulator and was set up with the spider capacitative attachments for 40 meters.  Well I was just interested in the 30 meter driven element to be used as a dipole below my current A3S beam on my tower.  I put the driven element on my deck about 8 feet off the ground and resonated all bands where I wanted them.  It checked out fine.  This required pulling off the capacitative hat and eliminating the end rods for 30 meters.
I then mounted the antenna about 20 feet in the air on the side of my tower to see how it would work before final installation.  The 30 meter band now resonated about 9.9 MHz instead of up into 10 MHz.  I surmised that due to the rain gutter that was near one end of the antenna.  I adjusted the elements some and got a pretty good match, less than 1.5 to 1 SWR on it by shortening the elements.  Then a strong rain storm came last night and the SWR shot up on 30 meters to over 3 to 1 and the same for 20 meters a high SWR.  I am suspicioning that the old traps on this used antenna are sucking water even though I used electrical tape to close and seal the end caps that were split and deteriorated.  Right now the SWR on 20 meters is very high and the SWR on 30 is over 3 to 1.  The other bands, 10 and 15 meters are as expected.  So am I on the right track in suspicioning the 20 meter traps?  I have read that Cushcraft traps can be disassembled and cleaned etc.  Anyone familiar with the 20 meter traps for the 30/40 add on?  Please let me know as any info would be appreciated.
Thanks in Advance
KB0GU