With the first of the three finished, I thought I would keep the impetus up and therefore set about the second. This is going to be another five compartment all-third, whilst the third in the set will be a four compartment all-first. I also have a drawing of a 25' 4-wheel luggage brakevan, so eventually I will be building a few of those too to bookend the six wheelers.

So I broke out the second Brassmasters Cleminson chassis yesterday and set to work, but almost before I started I ran into problems with the soldering iron.

I should point out it is practically a brand-new iron, that it cost me about £13 as part of a basic soldering kit amd that it is about of the 30 to 40W power range. The first time I used it was when I built the first of the chassis kits, just after Christmas, and within about an hour of starting to use it I noticed the tip had gone black. So did the metal barrel.

When I tried to use it yesterday I found that it took quite a long time to actually transfer any heat into the work; not knowing any better (then!) I took a file to the tip and scraped off the black gunk, and then it worked a little better for a short time before resuming its recalcitrant nature. Eventually I lost patience and gave up yesterday afternoon as a bad job. Reading up overnight I found a few tips and decided to have another crack at it this afternoon. Before I did anything I gently removed the black gunk from the tip and the barrel with kitchen roll, then took the tip out and cleaned out inside with a cotton bud-loads of blackish brownish dust being the result. I then put it all together again, plugged it in, and waited for it to heat up.

I was waiting a good ten minutes and it never got beyond the lukewarm stage of heat. I then got out my reserve iron- slightly older, but the same design, right down to the colour of the handle- and that had no problems at all. Interestingly, despite being older and cheaper and more used, I found the standby iron was better than the new one!- the tip was still shiny and took solder readily. The new one wouldn't even take solder for tinning.

I can only surmise that a cheap soldering iron is a hit and miss affair. You might buy two of them at the same time from the same shop and to the same design, and one of them might work perfectly whilst the other breaks down. Anyway; I have bought some new tips and more solder and I intend obviously to take very good care of the working iron!

So, after yesterday's false start, I built the second chassis today.