Just took a couple of photos of a patch of mail made of alternating rows of rounded and flat-section links. It shows the banding effect perfectly. The first has the light on the left showing the rounded links and the second has the light on the right showing the flat links.

Does anyone else have photos of regular mail that show a distinct banding?

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Mail made of alternating rows of rounded and flat-sectioned links.

This would go a long way to explain " banded maille " in effigies and other art work as not just an easy shortcut by the artists to depict maille and maybe infers that some maille may have been made of alternating rings of rounded maille with flat maille.

Maybe one or the other being solid rings and the other riveted ?

Well it does look rather good and might be interesting to own even in cases where one isn't necessarily prioritizing historical accuracy in maille. ( In any case historical maille is rare mostly custom/expensive and not available from production makers ).

By the way where did you get the patch of maille and are full shirts or hauberk available at an affordasble price ? ( Or just a sample made up by a custom maker ? ).

I made it from 1.2mm wire and some washers from Seastrom. ID is 4-5mm. The links are only butted - I was experimenting with smaller diameter links. It would take me a year to make an entire shirt from it.

Here is what it looks like with the light overhead. The banding disappears.

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Likewise, particularly in the not-so-close-up version of the image on my PC. A full shirt made like this would be very distinctive and would certainly stand out next to 'ordinary' mail. Interesting experiment......

Julian

The further away you stand the more obvious is the effect. You see it on mail made of all the same link, too, but it needs the right lighting. For anyone who hasn't read it, I wrote about banded mail in the Arador article.
http://www.arador.com/articles/chainmail.html

Dan, this is the best example I could find showing light and shadows creating that banded look. I could see how a sculptor could portray it like this on an effigy.
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Hi Len, that's a good one. Another thing I've noticed is that when the links are bunched up, like that one, the effect is more pronounced.