[arrover]

How-to find a crew cab (or whatever truck you're looking for):

Some people may not find this interesting but it may be helpful to others. In my experience, newspaper classifieds are basically dead. Usually (not always) trucks on ebay are priced high and could be anywhere in the US. Craigslist.org is the place to look for used trucks. It's free so sellers are more apt to use it and you can search areas that are close to you. Some people seem to think that crew cabs are hard to find but I don't really think that is the case. At least not in my part of the country. In my crew cab search I looked at craigslist for 678 days and found 337 crew cabs. That's right at one new crew cab truck listed for sale every two days. I was searching in about a 3 hour radius from me.

1. A huge time saver will be a craigslist browsing app for your smart phone. I use cPro or CraigsPro. There may be programs for your computer too. These let you search multiple areas fast, save searches (important), bookmark ads, hide ads that reoccur and waste your time, etc.

2. Get on craigslist and figure out what cities you are willing to drive to in order to buy a truck. Keep in mind that you might not end up buying a truck after looking at it and you will have wasted all of that drive time. Only search those cites/areas.

3. Search in the correct section on craigslist. The correct section is "For Sale" and then "Cars+Trucks". Searching from dealers and owners will let you find slightly more crew cabs but the dealer ads can take forever to go through, especially in a large city. In that case I only look at owner listings.

4. You can't just search for "crew cab" and expect to find alot of these trucks. Keep in mind that MOST people who use craigslist are TERRIBLE at writing an advertisement. Probably 2/3 or the crew cabs I found did not have the words "crew cab" in the listing. My search terms were "chevy", "gmc", "crew cab", crewcab", and "chevrolet". Almost all sellers refer to these trucks as Chevy instead of Chevrolet. It takes alot of time to search these keywords in multiple areas but that's where the special software from #1 helps.

5. If you search for "Chevy" in the auto section, you will get TONS of irrelevant results. We want to see just trucks from 1973-1991 (crew cabs ran to 1991, so did Blazers and Suburbans). In order to filter out the newer cars, type something like this: "
chevy -(2015) -(2014) -(2013) -(2012) -(2011) -(2010) -(2009) -(2008) -(2007) -(2006) -(2005) -(2004) -(2003) -(2002) -(2001) -(2000) -(1999) -(1998) -(1997) -(1996) -(1995) -(1994) -(1993) -(1992) ". The first word or words in the string is what you are searching for. Everything that is in the parenthesis will be taken out of your search results. So, for example, any add that has "2013" in it, will not be shown in the search results. It saves a ton of time by doing this.

6. Whenever possible, if your software allows it, hide listings that aren't what you are looking for so that you won't waste time looking at them again.

After I found a crew cab for sale, I would put some of the details (year,engine,4wd/2wd,trans,dually?,etc) in a spreadsheet so I could compare the trucks and narrow down trucks to look at. I used the last four digits of their phone number to help search for trucks in the spreadsheet to see if I already had them written down. I also printed off a sheet with the whole ad on it so I could look at it later on. Craigslist ads expire pretty quickly and then you can't look them up again.


Like I said before, I was able to find 337 1973-1991 crew cabs in 678 days. That's one truck every two days. Here are some other interesting stats (I was bored during the search and have a little bit of nerd in me):

Average asking price was $3012
Median asking price was $2500

4WD - 51 trucks (15%)
2WD - 96 trucks (28%)
Unlisted - 187 trucks (56%) BAD AD WRITING!!!!

Single rear wheel - 89 trucks (26%)
Dually - 215 trucks (64%)
Unlisted - 33 trucks (10%) I was able to tell by pictures even if it was not listed in the text.

Manual trans - 65 trucks ((19%)
Automatic Trans 169 trucks (50%)
Unlisted - 91 trucks (27%) BAD AD WRITING!!!!
No trans - 6 trucks (2%)
TH350 - 6 trucks (2%) Could have been a mistake by the seller

454 - 201 trucks (60%)
350 - 57 trucks (17%)
6.2 Diesel - 10 trucks (3%)
No engine - 15 trucks (4%)
Unlisted - 42 trucks (12%)
Other engine - 12 trucks (4%)

14% of sellers did not list a phone number and I have found craigslist emails only get through about half of the time....

GMC - 68 trucks (20%)
Chevy - 258 trucks (77%)
brand not listed - 11 trucks (3%)

Year brake down:
Year - # of Trucks
1973 - 2
1974 - 4
1975 - 4
1976 - 6
1977 - 16
1978 - 9
1979 - 14
1980 - 5
1981 - 8
1982 - 28
1983 - 16
1984 - 29
1985 - 19
1986 - 55
1987 - 23
1988 - 39
1989 - 34
1990 - 11
1991 - 13
Year not listed - 2


Ok, back to the build....