Starcraft

Starcraft is the oldest nameplate on this shelf and one of the oldest in American boating, and it did not start with boats at all. In 1903 Arthur Schrock founded the Star Tank Company at Goshen, Indiana to build metal feeding and watering tanks for livestock; by the early 1920s the same presses were turning out metal boats, the name became Star Tank and Boat and then simply Starcraft, and the farm equipment quietly left the catalog. The company kept innovating in metal for a century — in 1965 it built the first high-performance aluminum fishing boat with a deep-V hull — and after a detour through conglomerate ownership from 1969, the marine brand came back around to the founding family: Starcraft Marine builds today as one of the Schrock family's Smoker Craft brands out of New Paris, Indiana. A hundred-and-twenty-year-old name still in its founding family's hands is a rarity this industry cannot otherwise offer.

What the record says about the boats is unusually calm. Across the owner forums Starcraft draws the fewest complaints in its price class; PontoonHQ rates it the best-built of the entry-level pontoon brands, crediting details like stainless through-bolts where rivals staple, and it is routine to find owners on their tenth or twentieth season without a story to tell. The structure carries a limited lifetime warranty. The honest caveats sit at the edges: layouts and options run simpler than the premium yards, resale is softer than the marquee names, and the entry EX line — the very series a budget buyer will meet first — has almost no independent test record, because the press instruments the dearer boats and leaves the plain ones alone. On an EX, the yard's reputation is doing the model's work, and the survey does the journalism.

Our shelf carries that entry series at its strangest angle — a current-year hull advertised at used-boat money, with one question to settle before the drive:

Buy a Starcraft for the least drama per dollar in the class, and price the soft resale in as the cost of the bargain going in. Start with the EX 24, put it against its neighbors on the pontoons under $50k, and the whole powered fleet is on the powerboat shelf.

Sources: FundingUniverse, History of Starcraft Corporation; Smoker Craft Inc. history timeline; PontoonHQ Starcraft review; owner threads on Pontoon Forums and iboats.