Hi Mark, usually the method for extracting edges is to copy them - but if you want them to remain in the exact same spot then you can copy them by using the clipboard Copy and Paste instead of the Transform > Copy command.

When you say "rather than trying to copy it exactly." I'm not quite sure what that means - do you mean that you want to make some curves in the exact same spot as the edges instead of doing what the Transform > Copy command does which is more oriented towards placing duplicates at some other displaced location?

If so then select the edges that you want to extract, then do Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard as curves, then do Ctrl+V to paste those curves into the model, you will now have new standalone curve objects as new objects in addition to the edges. There are also buttons for clipboard copy and paste on the Edit palette - that's a slightly different copy mechanism than the Transform > Copy command.


Also one trick to speed up selecting the edges is that you can select just 1 edge of the surface and then do Ctrl+A to select all the other edges rather than doing them one at a time. That can be useful if there are a lot of edges involved. Once you have selected one edge then the "Select all" action that Ctrl+A does will focus just on edges of that object and select all of them.

Hope this helps, please let me know if I did not understand properly.

- Michael