Hi Wesley;

I built the North Star and I really like it. I finished it earlier this season and was very impressed with it's tracking and stabilities. It was very noticably easier to paddle than my other Yak (which is an older 16 foot '70's design and not a good comparison).

I built it from scratch, making all the strips, cove & bead, forms, and etc. I had problems with the half stations which Rob would not acknowledge and ended up altering the location of the half stations to get the hull faired out. After stripping the hull, I had to modify the deck portion of about four stations, and totally not use one station, in order to fair out the deck. It really wasn't as hard to correct as it might sound; just time consuming. I ended up building a new wood steamer settup and would highly recommend researching alternate steamer designs from those in the plans.

I don't know if the kit would have these problems or not.

I am a meticulous kind of person and this was my first strip built experience. I used epoxy to bond the strips together and no staples anywhere. I logged all my hours and exactly what I did durring each building session. I logged over 700 hours of actual time on the boat and 150 hours in setting up the garage, strongback, tooling and etc. I think this time would probably come down to closer to 600 hours on the boat if I built the same design again.

It's a beautiful and unique boat that handles better than I had expected. The added features in the stern and bow add to the tracking, looks and building time.

I am planning on posting some pic's as soon as I can (maybe a few weeks).

Happy paddleing, Doug

: Interested in general input/feedback on the Laughing Loon North Star. It
: truly is a beautiful boat and has interesting lines.

: I know several others have posted on this, and I refreshed my memory of some
: concerns builders had with the forms and offsets in the archives. However,
: I never heard how those issues were resolved, if at all. Perhaps someone
: out there has new information or would provide me with their overall
: thoughts.

: I have built a couple of Pygmy S&G's and am now ready to try something more
: challenging.

: Thank you,

: Wesley