Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Mechanic
The tube for the evaporative emissions system is just below the filler cap receptacle. If you fill too high then you can get liquid fuel into the charcoal cannister which dissolves the charcoal. The cannisters can set you back hundreds of dollars new and are considered owner neglect for warranty purposes. Most owners manuals warn against filling too high.
I just put the pump on the first (of two here) detents and let it fill the tank.
If you have the issue where you can't get the last couple of gallons in the tank which I have experienced in several of our cars where the filler neck is behind the wheel with the tank under the rear seat, I cut a piece of 2X4 and when I pulled up to the pump, I dropped the wood block in front of the rear wheel and drove up on it to give that end of the car a little extra elevation.
In those vehicles that were hard to completely fill the wood block trick worked great for me.
Typically if the nozzle of the gas pump is in the neck as far as it will go the auto shutoff will not let you overfill.
You can also listen to the fuel going in the tank and hear when it is getting close to the top.
regards
Mech
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Thanks, Mech.
Well, I'll bet I've been filling the charcoal cannister, then!! Do they hold over a gallon & a half, though? Yikes, dissolving the charcoal?!?!?! That can't be good!!
I actually do the wood-block-under-the-wheel-trick just as you describe it, but I'm not sure how much it's helping. I get the impression it's just compressing the spring on that particular wheel, and not really raising that corner of the car.
My tank won't take gas very fast even when it's low. Oftentimes, even the first detent on the fill nozzle will cause it to click off very quickly (like, almost immediately). At one point, I whittled a piece of wood into a wedge-like shape so I could shove it into the fill nozzle hand guard & under the lever so I could fill it slower than the first detent. That seemed to help, but somehow I lost that piece of wood. Making another one would be easy enough, tough.
Now that I know my tank holds as much as it does, and that I can go as far as I can between fills (and that I carry an extra gallon around with me in a jug), I suppose I can change my "habits" at the gas pump and try stopping at the first or second auto shutoff. - Especially if I start using the wood wedge to let me fill slow again. That will greaty speed my fill-ups and probably reduce the anger of the people waiting behind me at the pump, too!!
