Another cheat my extraterrestrial friends, when Kurt does the spokes he then goes around sewing up the edges of each spoke individually. I cheated when I did the last extrude, by ALMOST extruding to the point of overlap I saved time. I could then pick the central vertices in front view and merge (a little testing here folks) with my parameters set at 0.15, worked a charm and saved a lot of manual vertex merges.

cheers bullet