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Hey there. I'm super happy with my microbird. We were able to convert it to have a 3 tiered bunk bed system in the back with our larger full size at the top and 2 smaller beds for kids underneath and also a 4th bench bed for my older daughter, also a kitchen area, fridge etc..
Ours has the 6.0 powerstroke diesel. The motor is pretty tightly packed and that makes it kind of hard to work on, even my regular diesel mechanic who services my ford trucks wasn't happy about it but we got it tuned up and running smooth...generally fully loaded we're still pulling about 15mpg and a little more if there's less stops.
The downsides I found were:
The front seat is lonely...since there is the door opener in the front by the stairs there isn't a 2nd front seat so you end up sitting in the front by yourself while everyone else enjoys the ride. Our benches go right behind the driver so my wife can sit there and talk with me a little though but we've considered putting a pullout seat next to the driver so it isn't so bad on long trips.
The wiring is a lot of work and testing. I had trouble finding a matching schematic so I just had to test out all the wires to find out what was what which took a lot of time. We didn't get it perfect but definitely usable.
The rear ac isn't as great as we'd hoped. It works and blows fine but I didn't think it through that it only ran while the bus was running so when we camp it is essentially useless. I would've foregone looking for one that specifically had the rear ac had I thought it thru and mounted a window unit in the rear top instead but we've made due.
The tires are way expensive...thankfully our unit had nearly new ones on when we purchased it but something to keep in mind.
Overall this is a great unit. We painted ours outside in the yard to change from yellow to white and just used a cheap gravity feed paint gun and diluted farm implement paint from a hardware store. It's held up well so far and cost under $100 total.
To me your price point of 18k seems high, that's about $14000usd. For a reference our unit had about 160k miles on it, we paid $4000 out the door...I spent $1500 on a tuneup, brakes, etc... I would say it was in "average" condition, the biggest issues was the rear bumper was rusty. We bought from a bus sale / machine equipment distributor here who sells the trade-ins from school systems and they had maybe a dozen similar units at the time on their lot in the same price point. We also found several similar units on ebay in that same price range so you may shop around unless your unit is already converted or something like that.
Hope that helps you out some. It's been amazing fun for our family so far and should be years of more memories. If you buy the unit and need some tips or shortcuts please reach out. I converted ours over about a year period of working in my extra time. I could convert another one in about a month now and make it way better now that I've seen how it all comes together.
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