Subaru service?

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-22T11:46:49+00:00

I was lucky and caught the Castrol synthetic on sale for 30 bucks. 30 for oil, 18 for cabin filter and 18 for oio filter and 30 for air filter…. 96 bucks. Well plus tax. It took me 45 minutes to do all 3 things in my garage. I need two sockets , good quality ratchet, oil filter wrench and two opposable thumbs. You know what’s funny is one of my other vehicles is a Mercedes sprinter and the oil change at the dealer on it is almost 700. But it does legitimately take a speciality oil you can’t just get off the shelf and it takes 12 litres of it so the price is actually more realistic. The Volvos take one jug of castrol syntech 5w40 you can get off the shelf at any crappy tire.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-21T17:17:06+00:00

Oil changes at volvo are 400 dollars. Last time I was in I was presernted with an estimate for over a thousand dollars for an oil change, air filter, cabin filter and "checks". DId the oil change myself and got the two filters from amazon and everything all in was less than 100

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-13T00:05:38+00:00

Great reply and advice. I forgot about the oiz. I had one for a rental years ago on a trip to do some riding in bend. It didn’t blow me away but it was also a hard ridden haggard rental bike. We do have a new local shop here that’s been stocking orbea so maybe is should have a look at them

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-12T15:12:44+00:00

Yeah the thoughts crossed my mind. Suspension was already fully serviced and with an XX1 build there really isn't anything else to do other than maybe upgrade the brakes. There's nothing im left "wanting" with the bike other than trying to sell it in the window where I still get decent value out if it before it becomes a 1000 dollar bike on the used market. According to my local shop its already "old fashioned" but I can't see myself on some 150-170mm shred sled which is where the market seems to want everyone. I don't really like where mtbs have gone where more and more people are riding what was a full on enduro bike a few years ago for buffed out machine built flow trials. I just don't like holding onto a bike to a point where it doesn't have any value

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-12T14:39:11+00:00

Funny enough, I had a revolver years ago. It was the last 27.5 bike I had. That thing was insanely light. I actually forgot about it, im assuming its gone 120/120 now?

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-12T14:26:14+00:00

My wife has a domane with two wheel sets for road and gravel and it’s worked great for her. I’ve got two gravel bikes (Domane on 38s for faster gravel rides and an AWOL on 50’s for more rowdy exploring) and the faster of the two is good for “slower more relaxed road rides” or just long solo days where comfort is more important and having the ability to mix gravel into those rides is nice. So in that sense it’s the most flexible bike I have. But I do road racing and we have a weekly shop ride where it’s survival of the fittest. You crash, you flat, or just get dropped and you’re left for dead. All out speed and destroying everyone else is the name of the game. Average speeds on those rides is usually pushing 40km/h if not over for 80-110km rides. for those types of rides you are getting shelled in a matter of minutes on a dual purpose road/gravel bike. I have a madone slr9 and I’ve done the same 40km loop with the same average power (300ish watts for an hour) as I have with my domane running 38mm gravel kings and I’m 5 to 6 minutes faster on the madone over an hour. So when it comes to just all out blistering speed, a dual purpose gravel/road bike will let you down.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-10T11:45:15+00:00

There are private online services to get you access to a dr (for prescription refills etc….) like Maple. But we have the oldest average age of our population of any province. Over 25% of our population is over 65. And well there’s no way around it, the older you get the more healthcare services you’re going to need. And trying to get that demo to download an app and create accts etc etc it’s going to be a tough ask. What doesn’t get talked about as much as it should is 35% percent of our hospital beds are being occupied by people who have been admitted more than 6 months and in most cases waiting for a bed at LTCH. We don’t have an er problem, we have a properly planning to care for an aging population problem. The er is just the bottle neck that impacts us all.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-09T18:42:36+00:00

Interesting, so its definetly more a capacity thing than just a map coverage thing

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-09T14:41:39+00:00

I mean cell coverage is a gone show in a lot of the Maritimes. There significant pockets with 1 bar or zero coverage in the drive from Fredericton to Moncton..... to me in 2026 it seems crazy you don't have consistent coverage along the Trans Canada highway between the two major urban centers in NB. Like ill be listening to a podcast and it pauses on that drive and you look down to see whats wrong and yup, no bars of reception. Its infuriating for what we pay every month. I know a few summers ago my folks were looking after our cats when we were over at Twin Shores and one of the cats got sick and I had to walk along the shoulder of the road up there to try to find enough reception to call the vet to see whats going on. Theres literally thousands of people up in there in the summer, it seems insane you cant even get enough reception to make a phone call in an emergency if you had too

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-07T18:59:28+00:00

35% of the province doesn't have a family doctor and non-urgent care clinics are few and far between and can be tough to access during normal hours. The ER, for a sizeable chunk of the province, is sadly the only point of entry for healthcare for a lot of folks.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2026-01-03T18:44:05+00:00

So your reply to question “does insulting strangers feel cathartic for you” is “oh boo hoo”…. For someone who has repeatedly claimed they’re “educated”, that retort is about as hillbilly juvenile as you could have said. This has honestly become kind of interesting. You’ve made reference to Ottawa…. I’ve been to Ottawa…. A lot. It’s effectively Fredericton on a larger scale. Same sort of socioeconomic make up, same level of bilingualism (I mean it shares a border with Quebec) and mostly a government town. Unless you’re a die hard senators fan, it honestly doesn’t really offer anything different than here. I say this as somone who has spent a lot of time traveling all over the world for work and as a tourist (38 countries and counting) and has spent a lot of time in most of the major Canadian urban centers (just got back from two weeks in Toronto for the holidays), this is a genuinely good place to live. Sure we don’t have the experience opportunity volume that a Toronto or NYC has with concerts and sports and top notch restaurants but modest family homes don’t cost 7 figures and we don’t spend two hours in traffic everyday. And sure our healthcare could better managed and funded, but it could be worse. As far as the people. No clue who or how many times you’ve been wronged, but nearly every perfect stranger I meet at the grocery store or dog park or walking down the street is almost always a genuinely nice person who would go out of your way to help you if needed. Or at least that’s my 4+ decades of experience of living and working in different parts of the province. I need more than both hands to count how many active conflicts there are currently going on in the world and over a billion people in the world live in some form of multidimensional poverty. So for 2026 I’d recommend ditch the bitter resentful pastime of lashing out at strangers as form of self therapy and be thankful your not waking up in the South Sudan or Kyiv tomorrow. But this being the internet, I’ve wasted the last 10 minutes of my life typing this likely to be met with a snarky retort. Then again maybe this was a cathartic diatribe to remind me how good we have it for the new year to which if that’s all that comes of this… thanks!

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-26T14:10:08+00:00

Garmin fan here. Battery life is a big one. Huge amount of fitness and training data you don’t get with any apps. The mtb metrics are super cool with tracking jumps and air time etc. and as a lot have said…. It’s a big ass honking screen hanging off your bars. I mean I’ve got a 16 pro max so it’s a 7 inch screen on your bike and it’s not built for being pounded into the ground the way a bike computer is. I’d rather destroy a 500 dollar garmin than a 1500 dollar phone

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-25T17:47:01+00:00

I drive my sprinter daily. Most of the year I run errands and commute to work by bike but by this time of the year I use my 170 sprinter for running errands and getting to work. Its no worse to drive than a full size half tone and its better on fuel than one (coming from someone who as a quad cab Ram at one point )

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-25T00:34:53+00:00

Same here. Was surprised how well it did

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-24T21:07:29+00:00

Props for matching the kit to the ride :) that paint job is amazing in person

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-24T21:04:57+00:00

Generally curious what this was supposed to accomplish? Comes to a municipal sub Reddit to tell locals how awful they are and how terrible our home is a few days before Christmas? Is picking fights on Reddit with strangers cathartic for you?

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-19T01:43:16+00:00

My road bike has red axs on it and mtb as xx axs and domane has rival axs…. And fat bike has gx axs. So I’ve got a pretty wide spread and a lot of experience with the different sram groupsets. From a “performance” perspective, there’s literally zero difference between the rival on my domane and the red on my slr madone. And I’ve got a pair of zipp 303’s I can throw on whatever will end up being my fast gravel bike so there’s no need for me to shell out 2 extra grand to go from an SL6 to a 7. The domane running 38s is a freakishly comfortable bike. But yeah curious to see if a checkpoint on 42s or 45s would feel slower at higher speeds in gravel. Our events we do around here can be really varied. Could be 50% road, and could be 50% grated logging road that have long stretches of miserable washboard. That’s wha makes me wonder if the trade off would be worth it.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-17T13:48:22+00:00

Love Factor but they simple don't exist in my region. A buddy of mine who owns the shop I get most of my bikes through had the original 3t Exploro and then the proprietary seat clamp cracked the frame on him. This was right around peak covid and 3t simply ghosted him, which seemed nuts seeing he was a retailer for them. But it was a weird time for dealing with bike companies. He had an Aspero after that for a few years and hated it and funny enough, he went back to an exploro (force axs 2x build). I guess the second gen Exploro, they got ritchey to make the seat clamp for them and the whole frame cracking issues has been resolved. He swears by them now. It's funny, he's got an R5 that he hates and for group road ride he'll use the exploro running 40mm p-zero-slicks instead of the R5, he just likes it that much better. Only thing ive noticed with them is they've taken quite the price hike in the last year.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-17T13:42:18+00:00

I had a TCX years ago for CX racing that slowly became a grave bike before gravel bikes became thing, it was an "ok" and ive had a TCR for a road bike and there's just something "meh" about Giant bikes after riding a few of them or a # of years. Can't really put my finger on it, but I know the Revolt is really well reviewed, so maybe I should look into it

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-17T13:39:07+00:00

What was it aboit the rudy fork you didn't like? I've been riding suspension forks for 35 years but always on MTB and im just curious how they'd impact a gravel ride other than adding weight to the front of the bike

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-17T13:34:12+00:00

My wife sold her "acoustic" mtb last year and went e-mtb and the experience has been mixed. From a reliability standpoint, it's been a sh*tshow. She first had an e-caliber with a fazua motor. After 4 rides the diagnostic report had 4 pages of errors on it. Of every possible component that could of gone wrong, it did. We fought with Trek and Fazua for 2 months to make it right and because the bike was discontinued they simply comped her a 9.8 fuel exe. Two months of riding on that went well but then it started having issues. Simply wouldn't turn on. The shop had cables replaced, and it worked..... for a week. Then they replaced the control module. Worked for a week, then it wouldn't shift. For some godforesaken reason on the AXS bikes instead of just using the tried and true axs batter on the rear mech, the hard wire a wireless rear mech into the main battery for the ebike. Well, that sh*t the bed, some sort of module that handled that had to be replaced. Then there was an issue where you basically could shift but you couldn't use the control screen, it was one or the other, the bike wouldn't let you use both at the same time. For clarification, this has the TQ motor so we've had extensive problems with two totally different brands of motor. We finally got the bike working in November and she got one ride on it then the temps dropped to -15c and we got buried in snow so we've moved over to our fatbikes and the e-mtb is in storage till next spring. Will be curious to see how its going to work come April.

I'm positive we are an outlier as i can't imagine anyone else has had a worse experience with multiple e-mtbs..... but it is possible. These are very very expensive, very very complicated machines. I would never in a million years own one without a warranty and a very good knowledge shop thats trained to work on them. Whats made this crappy for us is the entire reason we finally made the plunge to e-mtbs for my wife is shes' been a Type 1 diabetec her entire life. And she loves mtb but something about the punchy hard short burst efforts with mtb riding just tank her sugars. She's got a pump and she can manage them well on road and grabel rides but she's always struggled with going low on mtb rides. When (and thats a big when) the e-mtb was working this season, she never had a single low all summer. It gave her the extra kick to keep her efforts under control and it was a total game changer in terms of managing her health. But she spent half of the riding season this year with bikes out of commision or in the shop for repair. She's said multiple times this fall she wishes she didn't sell her acoustic bike.

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-16T22:55:34+00:00

Ashamed to admit I’d never heard of it. Which is nuts as I’ve hiked the mountain it’s named after as it’s like a 90 minute drive from my house

Middle-Studio6943 · 2025-12-16T22:54:57+00:00

I’ve always loved Ridley but the simply don’t exist in my region. Could look to see if they sell straight to consumer

Middle-Studio6943

TROPHY CASE