Hi Duke,

> And yeah, you're right, ideally I don't want/need those curves
> there at all - can I get rid of them without rebuilding the end
> of the handle piece?

You can't normally just delete an edge, because of the way "underlying surfaces" work.

Check out here for some info on that and some illustrations.

But basically the way that NURBS works, just because 2 surfaces share a trim edge with one another doesn't mean that the underlying surfaces have any kind of control point alignment with one another.

Here is an example of that from your particular piece. This surface has an underlying surface with a control point structure like this:



And the one right next to it has an underlying surface with control points like this:




On the second one you can see that the edge there is actually a trimmed out area internal to the underlying surface, and you can see how the point structure is totally different, the surfaces themselves don't have very much in common there, they just meet a trimmed edge.


One thing you can do is to select trim edges and use Delete to "untrim" the surface and recover the underlying ones. I did that on the outer pieces here and got what looks like some of your original pieces:



If that could have possibly been done as one larger revolved piece or something like that, it would have probably got better topology in the end result.

- Michael