OAImages Blog

Occoneechee will soon issue two new “standard” flaps. To comply with policy that there not be any special Ordeal, Brotherhood and Vigil flaps these will be sold as the lodge’s “standard” flap and a “gold mylar special edition” flap. As the lodge has an ample stock of their older Vigil flaps, there will not be a “silver mylar special edition” flap at this time. It is expected these will be issued at the lodge’s Spring Inductions in May. Thanks to Greg Grimes again for keeping me informed of this lodge’s issues.

Occoneechee lodge’s previous vendor for their flaps is no longer a BSA licensee, so the lodge has turned to Shelby Patch Company to produce these flaps. Greg reports there are numerous differences between these two flaps and the lodge’s earlier Ordeal and Brotherhood flaps:

• The folks at National who now review all patch designs objected to the periods after each of the three Ws. The claim was that the use of the periods was incorrect here! So, the offending punctuation was removed. Are they not aware that “W.W.W.” is an abbreviation?
• The three lines in the face of the thunderbird are equal in length but not equal in width. The center line is noticeably wider. On the previous Moritz flaps these were equal in length and width. Other versions of this design had lines of unequal height.
• On the “gold mylar special edition” flap the two very little circles at the base of the head are filled with WHT thread versus GMY on the Moritz version.
• The two antennae on the “gold mylar special edition” flap is filled with white on the Shelby flap and on the Moritz it is gmy filled.

The key difference with these two flaps, which sets them off from all the other previous standard flaps from the lodge, is the lack of periods after the Ws. Barring odd thread breaks on the previous issues, this alone is sufficient to identify these two patches from Shelby.

Listing data for these flaps should be as follows: