  We start this work by revisiting the problem of the soldering of two chiral
Schwinger models of opposite chiralities. We verify that, in contrast with what
one can conclude from the soldering literature, the usual sum of these models
is, in fact, gauge invariant and corresponds to a composite model, where the
component models are the vector and axial Schwinger models. As a consequence,
we reinterpret this formalism as a kind of degree of freedom reduction
mechanism. This result has led us to discover a second soldering possibility
giving rise to the axial Schwinger model. This new result is seemingly rather
general. We explore it here in the soldering of two Maxwell-Chern-Simons
theories with different masses.
