Drafting Merit Badge

The badge tells you its own order, six requirements deep

Most merit badges are a list. This one is a chain, and the chain is stated rather than inferred, each requirement names the one before it by number:

Do these out of order and you will find yourself discussing a comparison you have not made yet.

Requirement 1 points at the wrong requirement, and it is worth knowing

Requirement 1 asks you to format two sheets of paper: one for your manual project, and one for "your lettering project (see requirement 5)".

Requirement 5 is a discussion with your counselor about how requirements 2, 3 and 4 differed. There is no lettering in it. The lettering project is requirement 6, which points back the other way and gets it right: "Use the formatted sheet of paper you prepared in requirement 1 for your lettering project."

Both the official requirements page and the printed requirements book say "requirement 5". This does not change anything you have to do (format two sheets at the start, letter the second one at requirement 6), but it is the kind of thing that makes a Scout think they have missed something. You have not.

The CAD drawing is not waiting for anything

Requirement 1 formats two sheets and says what each is for: the manual project and the lettering project. Neither is for requirement 3, because requirement 3's drawing is a file. Requirement 3 does not mention requirement 1 at all.

So the CAD drawing sits outside the paper chain and can be started immediately. If access to the CAD software is the thing you have to arrange (a school lab, a library machine, a free licence) start arranging it now rather than after requirement 2.

Requirement 4 is a round trip through your counselor

This is the only step on this badge you cannot finish on your own initiative. Requirement 4(a) has you hand over your drawings; your counselor then returns a redlined version asking for a change. Only then can you do 4(b).

That is a wait on somebody else's turnaround, sitting exactly in the middle of the chain, with requirements 5 and 6 stacked up behind it. Hand the drawings over as soon as they are done, and ask when you can expect them back.

The bill of materials appears in requirement 2 and mostly vanishes in requirement 3

All three options in requirement 2 ask for a bill of materials. In requirement 3, only the electrical option does: the architectural and mechanical CAD options ask for the drawing without one, even though their requirement 2 twins ask for both.

Worth noticing because requirement 4(a) says your counselor's redline may ask you to change a "BOM QTY". If you chose 3(a) or 3(b), your CAD drawing has no bill of materials on it for them to mark up.

Nothing says the two drawings have to be the same kind

Requirement 2 offers architectural, mechanical or electrical. Requirement 3 offers the same three. Nothing in either requirement ties your second choice to your first, so drawing a floor plan by hand and a circuit in CAD is allowed, and requirement 5 asks how the two differed, which is a question with more in it if they differ by more than the tool.

What this page is

The Drafting merit badge, drawn in the order its own requirements state. It is not a copy of the requirements: 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.