2001, a secondary school somewhere in Staffordshire. "Yes, you've made a good job of soldering that LED in there James, well done." And thirty seconds later I picked the iron up by the hot end.

2006, a halls of residence in Lincoln. 'I'll just solder these two brass rods together and then we'll see how it looks'.... HISSSSSS followed by my jumping around the room swearing.

When I say jokingly that when I solder I generally pick the iron up by the hot end, I'm usually being completely serious.

So why a few months ago I thought to try to tame the art I now forget, but I got as far as ordering a couple of Brassmasters Cleminson chassis kits and hunting out my soldering iron, and was about to start when the house got turned upside down for a few months and my modelling activities got put on hold.

Anyway, with a week or so off over Christmas and an empty house for the afternoon, I decided to have a go at it whilst things were fairly quiet and I wouldn't be interrupted, not too much or too often at least.

I ordered the Cleminson chassis in a fit of inspiration having seen a newly-restored GCR 6 wheeler, and when they arrived and I read the instructions it struck me that here is probably an ideal starter project. It's got very few parts, most of which are fairly big and chunky, and the remainder are either wire or smaller bits and there's the opportunity to get in one afternoon a (hopefully!) working chassis and some experience in soldering large and small pieces of brass sheet and wire.

I'm happy to say that after a few hours of work I've got a functioning chassis.

Now I do need to finish this off properly; I managed to flood one of the bearings with solder, so I haven;t fitted the ones in the kit and I will be buying some Romford top hat ones to fit instead, oh and I found that it really doesn't like the old plastic Ratio wheels so I had to use some Hornby metal ones (so I need to order another pack of those too before I can carry on with my carriage building plans), but it has been quite a useful experience and I'm at least a little happier now to solder. There are things that have mystified me though; the iron either getting red hot as soon as it was plugged in, or being plugged in for 10 minutes without getting warm. The solder either melting as soon as it sees the iron, or steadfastly holding on like grim death and refusing to melt even when the iron is glowing a bright cherry red. Places where the solder just refused to flow at all.

Now I'm not going to go off and build my pair of Jidenco Barnums straight away, but I think once I have built the other pair of chassis I have I'll be ready to tackle at least one or two of the Brassmasters GCR wagons, and then we'll see about those big excursion carriages.