Thanks, I did get it sorted tho, just took a lot longer and ended up being a lot more complicated than I had anticipated it would.
Used a lot of rail clone, weld average, then rail clone a segment of the welded, and repeat as need be, till I got it smooth enough, then hand tweaked and patched it from there out.
It turned out well enough I guess. Can't call it poly friendly, but it'll bake off a wicked normal map if I want.
Yeah, I s'pose hair can be pretty tricky, deciding what approach to take, I think it comes down more to the texture than it does the modeling.
I like this approach to hair I think...[Naturally you'll probably want to throw more polys into it than that, but the same principles apply]
Low Poly Hair - by Paul Tosca - on 3DTotal