My first time through I wasn’t able to flatten the bottom of the bowling pin because the bottom was a weird half-star looking shape instead of a circle. I couldn’t delete this face, so I backed off the number of iterations in the Decimate modifier until it was a circle again. When I tried to flatten this I got a really weird shape. When I tried deleting just the outer ring of faces I discovered there was geometry INSIDE the bowling pin. Nothing I did would get rid of it. Also, the normal were all over the place. The only problem that I could think of was that I had trouble fitting the Bezier curve on the bottom and ended rotating the handles in all kinds of directions and probably twisting the curve. So I did it all over again and it worked out fine.
Here’s a picture of the normals of the two constructions. 'nuf said.
