I had that exact problem using the same type of pump with my truck and
a gas can. It turned out that because of the curl, the end in the can
had a tendency to curl up and actually end up higher than the end in
the truck tank. Unless the vehicle end of the hose is higher, you will
lose suction and the whole thing quits. As long I watched real close
to make sure nothing was curled up, it worked fine. I ended up using a
wire coat hanger to make a bracket kind of thing to hold the hose ends
straight.

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 13:42:03 -0400, "jay1000"
wrote:

I've got a 2 KW Honda generator. Figured on using gasoline from my two cars
if we ever had to run the generator for a long period of time. So I bought
a hand-pump primed gasoline syphon (hate the taste of gasoline) and tested
it by syphoning from a gas can to the Honda gas tank. Then I tried to
syphon out of the car gas tank to the gasoline can and it doesn't work. The
only reason I can think of is the end of the hose is not in the gasoline
pool in the car's gasoline tank. The plasic hose tends to curl so that
might be the problem. Or there can be some sort of baffle in the tanks to
prevent syphoning. One car is a 98 Cutlass and the other is a 2000 Subaru.

Any thoughts on "how to syphon gasoline from a car"?