Hi Tim, one of the best ways to make things look smooth is to build it as a larger simple piece, and then carve pieces away from it using booleans.

The model you have here has been built in a much different way than that - you've built it in a kind of "patch by patch" method, which seems to be a common approach used by people who are familiar with a polygon modeling program.

NURBS modeling tends to work best with a much different strategy than what you would do in a poly modeling program.

Here are a couple of previous discussions that may give you some ideas on how to approach stuff with a more NURBS type strategy.
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3321.17
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3105.7


Try to make your model made up of larger more simple structured sheets which can then can have pieces cut out of them.

Try to avoid things like making the final edges of your model first and then trying to build little patches between each of those - instead of explicitly drawing all the final edges of your model you instead want to have some of them come from intersections and booleans.


Also see this previous post for another kind of example of building things in larger pieces to make smooth results:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1398.19


Do you possibly have some images or sketches of the thing that you're trying to build? Seeing some more details on what you are trying to build towards could help to give some better feedback.

- Michael