My Gen.2 -Now only holds 31/2 gallons of gas in the tank bladder

I wonder in a situation like that if the rubber is just stiff or if there has been a leak and there are 6 gallons of gas between the bladder and the tank wall.

 

Are you happy with the car, other than the fuel tank? Is it in nice condition and worth keeping if not for the fuel tank? If so, maybe it's worth just replacing the fuel tank? Complete used assemblies are easily available if desired. I have a salvage yard about 20 miles from my house that actually offers mechanic services also, where they will install purchased parts for a reasonable fee. They have 2 lift bays and seem to stay fairly active. Maybe you could find something similar by calling around.

Or do you have your eye on another car and this is a good enough reason to let it go and move on to something else?

Both are reasonable options.

 

Sometimes, the pump nozzle shuts off early because of another issue somewhere in the onboard refueling vapor recovery (ORVR) system, and gets misattributed to the bladder because that's a part of the system that people have usually heard of.







More info in this post and following.

 

still goes farther than a leaf...

 

I'm in agreement with ChapmanF.

The bladder gets far too much blame for a lot of things. Having a car with no bladder, all the symptoms I've ever read about that are attributed to the bladder happen in our cars. So I would encourage people to drop these ideas and start thinking about what is actually going on.

I have only read of just a few threads where the OP followed Chapman's train of thought and successfully fixed their problem. Interestingly, the faults were not the same, but nevertheless, they were in the fuel EVAP/ORVR in the back.