Wow, this has turned out to quite an experiment. All of the ideas posted work and I can see different applications for all of them. The attached screenshots show Kix's vertex fill on the left and Mark's joining on the right. The vertex fill yields a hollow shape and the join yields a solid. To accomplish the join idea I first simplified the curves with a fidelity setting of 100%, this also joined the seperate vertexes. All that remained was to join any vertex forming a hard angle instead of a curve, on this shape that meant a total of 2 joins, easy! Hoofdcommissaris pathfinder idea also works with great ease as long as I don't need 100% accuracy, this is the case often enough to add this to my bag of tricks. Thanks all for the help!! As usual the forum saves the day when I have grown tired of banging my head against the wall. Michael