terra pump is temporary (or permanent) solution for no fill gas tanks

been through all the threads new and old regarding problems filling the gas tank. our 2008 has always been a 7 or 8 gallon machine with occasional nuisance shutoffs of the fill, but it wasn't intolerable and 8 gallons at 40 gives you 320 mile range. thats not quite what we got on our 4 cylinder camries at 27 * 16 for 432 miles per tank but we could live with it.

got a 2005 and it has the absolute no fill tank. not sure if its the tank or the filler neck but either one of those could cost half what the car did. there were some aftermarket tanks that are in the reasonable price range but they are all out of stock. my wife insisted on spending a hundred bucks to have a mechanic tell her, don't know but for another $250 i'll take the tank out and see if I can tell. I'm not really blaming them, this is a nebulous problem but you can't even put gas in this car at the station. i managed to trigger a station pump at a bare dribble and spend 15 minutes to get 5 gallons in it with the obligatory spewing of gas to circumvent a lifetime of benefit form this green gas tank in one or two fillings! (or course we have no idea whats in the tank to start because the gauge is useless).

I just have not read any threads on here that have shown that problem solved by cleaning the filler neck or vent but maybe those just don't come up when i search hard time filling.

so decided to try a semi mcguyver thing. I used our battery powered terra pump for filling small tractors. At first I tried this with a very little spout insertion and same problem only without automated shutoff it just sent gas back from the filler neck into the gas cap area which would have overflowed but i kept a hand on the switch. I had though maybe loose would be better to allow some venting. no dice. Then i notice that the corrugations that allow the spout to bend were actually perfectly sized to hold the spout tightly into the narrowing pipe of the fill neck after the cap. And voila, 5 gallons in in less than 5 minutes without a hint of spillback. I put the 6 gallon can on a milk crate (donated by some local dairy) to make it high enough so the pump could be all the way to the bottom of the can and the spout would still reach the fill neck without having to hold the can up.

we first got these pumps when EPA screwed up gas cans but, I have to admit going north of 60, even with a decent spout, I like letting the double A's do the work! (and we have learned through experience, buy the terra double-a. The d battery format (e.g. harbor freight version) seems to have problems with battery connections with a month of 2 of placing in service on every unit we bought. i just put up the quickest link I could find. it is for 2 pumps on amazon, but im sure you can find it as a single out there on the web.

So compared to the price of gas tank/gas filler, i've found my solution–although i'll try it a few more times and make an update if this first try was an anamoly and i'm overly optimistic.

brian