Hi

I created an assembly featuring an epicyclic gearbox, and used toolbox gears to create it. I needed to customise all three gears with extra features, but of course SW does not allow direct editing of toolbox objects. So I saw the "Make independent" option. I created newly named objects with names like "planet_gear_mod", with a small lip inside the bore for bearings to butt up against, and at first it seemed that the assembly was happily using them. I had a number of mates created with the newly edited features I had added.

Then today I opened the assembly and the build failed, and all those mates are now broken. I noticed that all the toolbox gears had reverted to their "base" models. They still used the module number etc that I selected, but none of the extra edits I had made were there. They still retained their new names, but upon trying to edit I got the usual message about trying to edit a read only object.

Is "make independent" the wrong way to create standalone, editable versions of toolbox gears? Is there some other more reliable route to doing so? Is there some specific way the folder structure should be arranged?

Thank you for reading