In the past few years, the BSA Supply Division has made changes to the front designs to several merit badges. Also, starting around 2006 they began to have “Scout Stuff” printed on the back of the patches. Fred Duersch is the current editor of the Merit Badge Field Guide and author of the current classification system for merit badges. These new ‘SSB’ (Scout stuff back) merit badges are called “Type – J”.

Well, with any transition across an existing inventory and new products coming out, not everything is done consistently. Too many moving parts. While doing some cataloging and updating our inventory of merit badges I noted having one not yet listed as a type H – plain plastic back called Auto Maintenance. In theory this badge should not exist as it came out in 2008, after the conversion to SSB.

Another one is Composite Materials.

Fred and Craig McDaniel are working on an article for ISCA to catalog these transition oversight issues. They are likely to be quite scarce. It is like the transition from square merit badges to wide crimps. Many of the rarest, and most valuable, square merit badges are the ones that just came out before the transition (e.g., Pigeon Raising, Rowing, Mechanical Drawing).

Update: Talked with Ron Oslin at the Dallas TOR about these. What he pointed out was some of these post SSB badges had problems with the Consumer Protection laws that limited the use of pthalates (sp?), a chemical used to soften plastic on the backing of these patches, so that some came in to this country without SSB even though they never existed in the plastic back era. Still, they are going to show up on Type H – plastic back collecting lists as that is where they fit in.