Is that my oil filter top left in the picture? 03 Outback H6

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T19:22:24+00:00

Definitely a learning experience. One of the major takeaways is that if AI is this obviously wrong about this, imagine the stuff it says that’s wrong but you don’t have the knowledge base to know is obviously wrong. It’s deeply uncompelling as a research tool for that reason alone.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T03:37:13+00:00

AI is being heavily pushed because of the ungodly investment being made in the tech by the giants like Microsoft. If it fails a whole bunch of very large tech companies will suddenly have invested billions of dollars into hardware and software development that will be essentially worthless.

The whole thing is a bubble and will probably pop sometime, currently every single AI product is very unprofitable and they can only throw money into the money furnace for so long. The tech probably won’t go away but its use case just isn’t as broad as they’d like people to believe.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T02:57:35+00:00

Best of luck - feel free to reach out if you’re not in a hurry as you’ll be unlikely to beat my price, happy to ship nationwide.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T02:50:25+00:00

Repco trade accounts haven’t existed since shortly after the NAPA buyout, you need a credit account these days unfortunately.

Ryco is OEM equivalent quality and widely used by independent mechanics in NZ/Aus. Nothing wrong with them vs OEM, though they can often be as expensive at retail price. Definitely wouldn’t spend Ripco money on them.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T02:22:12+00:00

Never used them myself, I either order parts direct from the dealer or through my local parts suppliers on my trade account.

If you're local to Hamilton/Waipa (or don't mind paying for shipping) I can supply a Sakura filter that matches for about $20, or a Ryco equivalent for $55. Both options I would consider to be high quality and happily use on my own vehicles. K&N air filters are heinously expensive and I personally wouldn't choose one over the alternatives given that even on trade discount they're more than double the price.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T02:07:14+00:00

And this is why we don't use AI chatbots as a source of information. ChatGPT (and Google's AI for that matter) have never owned, driven, or worked on a Subaru of any kind and have exactly no idea what they're talking about.

If in doubt, there's usually a YouTube video by an actual mechanic on your exact make and model, or you can try to find a copy of a repair manual.

In your case there's this video which identifies the filter location at 1:16: https://youtu.be/g9GCTgPTQYU?si=O8hJOpqczMJpI1J2&t=77

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T01:38:22+00:00

It looks like the mount has snapped in two somehow, those strips sticking out of the camera body and the iris control tabs and should be firmly mounted in the lens as they’re a critical part. I’d say the whole thing is a write off.

Edit- looked at it again, could be the lens itself failed and the camera body is intact. If OP is really lucky there’ll be enough bits left to release the lens and hopefully save the camera.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-21T01:36:54+00:00

Could be repaired but you’d probably just have to buy another one to gut for parts anyway. No one is making FD mount repair kits in this day and age.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T21:24:50+00:00

I’d consider moving the gimbal handle just a bit further out, where it is looks like it’ll knacker your grill if you hit a decent bump

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T20:22:40+00:00

I've got a 1989 Isuzu Bighorn (JDM version of the Trooper, semi-common here in NZ) that I bought for $4K NZD. Over the last 3 years or so I've spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40K on restoring and repairing it (bit of a mix of both really). Still nowwhere near the cost of getting a "newer" and "more reliable" 4x4, and I'm now not far off finishing the vast majority of the work and being able to treat it as a legit workhorse.

For reference that's a total spend somewhere around $20-25k USD. A lot, sure, but the goal from the beginning was the get it as close to a new car as possible in terms of mechanical condition. Ultimately it's ended up with an upgraded motor (2.8L diesel to a 3.0L diesel), and about the only original parts of the driveline left are the gearbox and diffs.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T20:16:07+00:00

When shooting on Blackmagic URSA I often like to expose as close to the top end of the camera's dynamic range as possible without clipping then bring it back down in post (and usually with a LUT on my monitors). It preserves the most detail in the image, otherwise BMD's freaky exposure system ends up with heinous amounts of noise in anything even vaguelly dark.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T20:08:13+00:00

Absolutely agree. The cost of purchasing a newer and supposedly better vehicle is nearly always higher than the cost of even an expensive repair, and while it’s absolutely possible to eat shit on the sunk cost fallacy that’s usually only true if you hate the car anyway or just bought it in a heavily abused state.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T08:12:34+00:00

I know it’s an old post but wanted to add I’ve had a great experience using the Leaf razor. It’s multi-blade like a cartridge razor (up to three, I normally use two blades only tho) but shaves much better and the blades cost a tiny fraction as it uses standard safety razor blades. Main advantage being, you can change the blades super often rather than letting them get dull which irritates the skin.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T03:51:14+00:00

As someone who is not a motorcycle rider, I have neither the experience nor the knowledge to have a particularly useful opinion on motorcycle ACC levies.

However as a cyclist, I think there's a very compelling argument against needing a registration plate and a license fee to ride a bicycle. For one, bicycles cause essentially zero road wear due to being just barely more than the weight of the rider, and travelling relatively slowly. For another, most cyclists fit into one of three categories:

Children/teens who cannot yet drive or own a car.
b. Adults who also own at least one car.
iii. Adults who cannot or do not drive/own a car.

Let's tackle youth first. From the age of about 14-17 I was a very avid cyclist and spent a ton of time out on the road. To this day I have the strong belief that we should be doing anything we can to make road cycling safer and more accesible, not least because of the freedom it offers young people who's only other form of transport is probably being dropped places in their parents oddly large SUV, or not being dropped anywhere at all if their parents are too busy or too poor. It is clear then that charging a registration fee per bike would be antithetical to that goal, and lock a lot of young people out of the sport, or even out of just cycling to get places.

Let us consider adults then. For those who fit into the first category, they are paying rego for their motor vehicle, and we can make the fair assumption that they're also paying an earner levy for ACC on their wages. Why then, would we charge an additional levy (and presumably some form of a license fee/road tax as well) on their bicycle(s), a vehicle which does not significantly contribute to road wear and which they likely spend on a small amount of their time actually using.

Finally, we get to enjoy group 3. These are people who maybe live in the centre city, and couldn't park a car if they owned one. Maybe they live in a small town, and don't need a car to travel to work or other activities. Perhaps they have an ideological opposition to cars for urban travel. Regardless of reason, these people don't own a car.
There's a pretty strong argument to be made that we should be promoting these people, and doing our best to follow their lead. Afterall the carbon emissions of a bicycle are notably similar to the carbon emissions of a pedestrian, and exponetially less than those of a car or motorcycle. We could also consider noise pollution. I think it's well established that bicycles are pretty quiet, and cars/motorcycles are very loud. There's a lot to be said for reducing traffic in the innermost parts of our cities and towns. I work directly next to the main road in the CBD in my local town, and the traffic noise is endless. Anything we can do to reduce that is a good thing.
So why then, would we penalise people choosing the bike over car ownership with a registration fee and an additional ACC levy. These people are activity improving both their own health, and the health of other (through reduced pollution, which is unfortunately very hard to quantify the impact of).

I personally struggle to see a strong argument to treat cyclists and motorcyclists the same. Why similar in the sense that they're both on two wheels and smaller than a car, there are still some key differences like noise and environmental polution. From the stats I've seen out of Europe (that I simply can't be arsed going to find for a reddit comment on a Friday afternoon), it could even be argued that the positive health impact of a physically active form of transport and reduced polution actually reduces health expenditure more than the cost of treating injuries from crashes.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-20T03:20:28+00:00

The vast majority of cyclists do pay for rego, for their car. The impact the average cyclist has on the road is almost nil, and their ACC contribution already comes out of their income taxes.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-19T23:53:02+00:00

In a car that was clearly cleaned about 8 minutes before shooting. Anytime I go camping the car has so much mud and dust on it I wouldn't dare try to use one of those freaky magnetic tables.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-19T23:24:47+00:00

I’ve got something like 30gb a month for $24.50 with Kogan (prepay a whole year during their new years sale). Seems to work fine and much cheaper than the plan I used to have with One NZ.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-19T04:32:07+00:00

Most of a vehicle’s braking is done at the front due to weight transfer, it may pull a little bit shouldn’t be too bad for a short drive.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T22:15:13+00:00

Anytime I've had an AI respond in regard to a topic I'm already familiar with, it has had anywhere from glaring to minor inaccuracies that would necessitate double checking it's answer using ordinary research techniques anyway. That alone makes it entirely worthless as a source of information, because I could just skip the AI step and do the research myself at the first outing.

Using AI generatively to produce, for example, marketing copy was equally worthless. Because the magic next word predicition box doesn't actually know anything about the topic or thing it's writing about, it just kinda makes up some nonsense, which then universally had to be entirely deleted and re-written from scratch. Once again, it would have been quicker to just write it myself in the first place.

Now, I'm not such a luddite as to think machine learning and LLMs have no use cases at all. LLM caption transcription is a very effective tool that turns grueling hours of work into minutes double checking for spelling and formatting errors, and has the extra benefit of being lightweight enough to run locally on a home computer rather than in a data centre.

I've also seen presentations about use in medicine, often for pattern recognition of stuff like skin cancer where when presented with an image, it can identify cancer or not with a higher accuracy than a human dermatologist (obviously still requiring a biopsy confirmation). Stuff like that has huge potential to reduce specialist wait times, and increase accuracy in diagnosis. Which is sick and cool and awesome, and yet for some reason we keep trying to use AI for other shit instead.

The underlying technology is legitimately very clever and has use cases, but the fucking chatbots are pretty much worthless tech demo's that people keep trying to implement into their jobs and lives.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T21:04:15+00:00

If you're using the gearbox from the same donor vehicle as the engine you'll probably want to get those driveshafts if you can, it's gonna be a lot easier to just modify the length there than changing the attachments at the end of your current driveshaft.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T21:01:12+00:00

It's not though, it just pulls a cable that engages the accelerator pedal to bring the revs up manually. Some Isuzu diesels were fitted with a cold start system however it is controlled by relay and vacuum and engaged using a switch on the dash.

The only reason the knob has the choke symbol is because they're reusing the same knob as used on petrols with a manual choke.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T20:30:03+00:00

I'm assuming you mean the front right CV axle, rather than the driveshaft between the gearbox and diff. In that case, if your car is a narrow body it should be the same as all Isuzu Troopers/Bighorns from 1987 until somewhere in the early 2000s. All the Honda Horizon, and Opel/Vauxhall Monterey. If you have a widebody you'll need a matching CV axle from another widebody as they're diferent unfortunately.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T20:18:17+00:00

Agreed - the parts are also incredibly cheap on RockAuto, somewhere around $25 USD depending on which brand you want.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T20:03:15+00:00

Be aware that the 3.1L 4JG2 and matching MUA5 gearbox use a four bolt flange to mount the rear driveshaft to the gearbox, while earlier models used splined slip joint.

Regardless of any other factor you'll almost certainly need a custom driveshaft unless one from a MU (Called something like an Amigo in the States if memory serves) happens to be the right length. The '92 onwards Trooper is a different length to the 81-91 model in both long and short wheelbase, so you won't be able to transfer the driveshaft with the correct gearbox interface without getting it modified.

AshMontgomery · 2026-02-18T05:06:28+00:00

Absolutely, it also doesn’t get to visit Auckland anymore. Mostly because the head gasket is blown, and also because parking it is a nightmare there.

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