  We investigate the effectiveness of using smearing as a means to generate a
preconditioning transformation for gauge fields prior to fixing to Maximal
Centre Gauge. This still leaves the gauge-fixed field in the original gauge
orbit. As expected, we find that this preconditioning leads to higher maxima of
the gauge-fixing condition, resulting in lower numbers of P-vortices. We also
find that removing vortices appears to give a loss of confinement for all cases
but that the string tension as measured from vortex-only configurations drops
from about 65% to as low as 26% when using the preconditioning method.
