In an Assembly, I'm trying to set two similar parts a set distance apart in space. I want to mate them by the center of a hole in each part. I can mate by distance using the origin of each part, but that's not where I want the set distance. I've made axis through the hole and planes through the axis, I thought an easy mate of distances between the planes, but mate won't recognize both planes at the same time. That is, I can't set the mate distance between parallel planes through hole 1 and hole 2. Nor by axis, nor by 'mate reference' point.
This seems a simple problem to me, but I can't make it work to do the simple set distance between the bottom holes as shown below.
As Dan said, we can't see the picture, but the highlighted part of your statement makes me wonder if you created the axes and planes as Assembly features and not in the Part files. If that's the case it would explain why you can't use them to apply a mate between the two Parts.