Hi, apologies for not getting back earlier, I was away from the computer.
Many thanks for both of your input, even though I'm not going to ask you to spend any of your valuable time
fixing things, please find attached the scene for you to have a quick look and maybe point out immediately what's wrong. (most probably the whole lot as this is my first finished model in Maya)
Although the outliner is a complete mess, I do have quick selection sets consisting of faces of which I had thought would be quicker to assign joints to. But whatever I choose to do, be it grouping faces or trying to skin all I seem to get is errors.
Maybe you can point out what's going on.
Thanks again for your help.