Hello. I am interested in buying one of these little gems. My wife and I are both retired, and live in the Mid-Atlantic region. Over the next two years, we intend to investigate relocation to Florida. In that process, we intend to spend significant time there investigating several areas on the Gulf Coast. If we rent real property during that search, we will be forced to either pay through the nose competing with the regular snowbirds in prime season, or to travel there at a time of year that differs from when we would be resident after purchasing a home (we also have some property with a cabin in the Virginia mountains where we would "Summer"). I don't like either alternative, so I had looked into varieties of Class B - C motor homes, to serve as "home" during our investigations. I didn't at all like what I found in terms of reliability and repair costs. Worse, it appears that the newer the MH, the worse the QC will likely be. It appears to me that the quality and reliability of these older Toyota truck-based campers is typically superior to that of contemporary van-based units. While I would need to convince my wife about buying as old a unit as one of these, I think I could do that. But first I need to come up with a strategy to locate some good examples that are for sale. The "for sale" site linked to this board site shows nothing at all. A little investigation on Craigslist showed that there are some available, but most of those seemed to be far away from me (ntm that I'd prefer an example that hadn't spent most of its time rusting away around here near the ocean). I did find a web site that shows some results from crawling the web for ads (CL, etc.) for these units, but that is good mostly for pricing comparisons, as the truck has nearly always sold by the time they scrape and publish the ad. Under some circumstances, I wouldn't mind a long drive (or even a flight) to evaluate an important purchase, but the probability of finding some show-stopper issue that wasn't previously disclosed is too great for an item as old as this. Anyone have any observations or recommendations on how I might go about acquiring one of these? Thanks.
P.S. - I saw one of these (I think it was an '86 Dolphin) on FM Marketplace that claimed to be diesel powered. I know that Tacomas did offer diesel at some point, but I thought that was quite a bit later. Is that Diesel Dolphin plausible, or likely just BS?