Hello all,

I'm using a sub-assembly to model a PCB and many of the components that are on the assembled board.

I've made the PCB sub-assembly flexible so that I can position parts on the PCB in the context of the master assembly and in relation to other parts.

Mating in the parent assembly works as expected and I can get all my parts into the desired locations.

The problem I'm trying to solve is that now my PCB components that are fixed in the master assembly are still under-defined in the sub-assembly. This is a major problem as I'm looking for changes in the master assembly to propagate down so that I can base other parts (test fixtures and such) off of the pcb assembly.

I've tried mating the sub-assembly in the context of the main assembly but I cannot reference the parts in the master assembly. I could probably add intermediate 3D sketches in the PCB sub-assembly in the context of the master and then mate to that but I was hoping there was a better solution. This also won't solve a related problem of getting parts to mate between two flexible sub-assemblies.

Is using a flexible sub-assembly the wrong thing here? I could use a monolithic assembly with folders to group my parts but that doesn't let me take advantage of the PCB sub-assembly easily.