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.

15 pages, no figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. D