Composite Materials Merit Badge

Requirement 5 runs backwards

Nothing about this is hidden, each part says what it needs. But a numbered list is read as an order, and this one is the reverse of the order the work happens in.

5(b) is not "find a site" in the casual sense. The requirement is a site where the projects can be safely completed under your counselor's supervision, or under an adult your counselor has approved who is knowledgeable about composites. That is a place and a person, and both are arranged rather than found.

5(c) is stranger still, and it is the one people skip. You agree the evaluation criteria with your counselor, and then the finished projects are evaluated using those guidelines. Agreeing them afterwards is not what the requirement says.

You need the pamphlet

Use composite materials to complete two projects, at least one of which must come from the Composite Materials merit badge pamphlet.

Most merit badges treat the pamphlet as the recommended reading. This one makes it a dependency: one of the two projects has to come out of it, so it has to be in hand before requirement 5 can even be planned.

The second project is freer: from the pamphlet as well, or one you choose yourself approved by your counselor in advance. In advance is doing some work in that sentence.

Six safety data sheets

Six documents to obtain and read, sitting inside a requirement that otherwise looks like a discussion. They are not hard to get, manufacturers publish them, but they are a fetch-and-read task rather than something you can answer from memory, and requirement 1(c) is what makes sense of them.

The one hard dependency

3(c) For each of the three resins you chose for requirement 3(b), think of a new application that might be worth developing.

This is the only place on the badge where one requirement names another by number, so it is the only place the plan draws a dependency that the badge itself states. Choose the three resins in 3(b) with 3(c) already in mind and the last part writes itself.

What this page is

The Composite Materials merit badge, drawn so the agreements come before the work they govern. It is not a copy of the requirements and it carries no safety instruction of its own: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.