Yeah -- I think the merging the vertices on the seam is what I need to do ... Mirroring w/ polys is no big deal -- it's more a problem that I have when using subdivs .. When you're working on one half, the mirrored side is not actually attached to the right side (that is, it's two subdivision surfaces, not one). So maybe the seam would go away when I got all the way to the end and merged the the objects together and the center line would collapse into a single normal. I never actually got that far because I was so busy trying to get rid of the seam