Not clear to me either Jean.
Nor to anybody I know in Solo.
My personal opinion is that whilst some things are pretty obvious and known to virtually everybody, such as the distinction between Jawa and Madura, just about everything else is up for grabs.
In fact, going back a long time to when I got my first few keris, keris that had been collected mostly in Batavia (Jakarta) in about 1920, most of those keris had no mendak at all. I know that some mendak patterns are accepted by many people as Jogja, and others as Solo, but then you get the situation where you find something that has previously been identified as Solo being identified as Jogja, because it is on a big Jogja jejeran, rather than a small one.
For as long as I've been going to Indonesia, which is 40 odd years, the distinction that seems to be most usually made is between Central Jawa and East Jawa/Madura.
East Jawa Madura are generally a little bit bigger, and are hollow, Central Jawa are fabricated and a little bit smaller, but in practice it seems as if the general rule for use is that if the mendak fits the jejeran, and looks OK, that is what gets used.
If we look at keris that we know to be pre-1700, what we find is that a lot of these keris do not have mendak, even though they would have been collected as virtually new keris. Others of these early keris have a quite high fabricated mendak, with some applied ornamentation.
Then we have the rare iron mendaks, which I think probably belonged with the North Coast iron seluts, and I believe are a direct continuation of the metuk which preceded the mendak.
Sorry Jean, I cannot answer your question.
Actually these mendak are not really a collection, they're just a few of the more interesting ones I have, I've probably got about 500 mendak and wewer, all stored in bottles.
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