I'm modeling a 4 jaw chuck which is used in a lathe. I have inserted one jaw and the associated drive screw into one of the slots. I then used a feature driven pattern to place the other three jaws. The problem I'm having is there is a link between the seed part and the pattern parts. The link that I'm talking about is the one which causes any motion of one part to also happen in all of the other patterned parts. For example if I rotate the drive screw for one jaw the exact same action occurs in each jaw. The correct action in a four jaw chuck would have each jaw moving independent of the others.
The reason for using the feature pattern is to save time and it allows easy configuration of the chuck to have a different number of jaws by modifying the number of slots in the original pattern.
You can't break that relation. You can either have a pattern or not. You can dissolve a pattern after you create it, but then you will have to add mates for each component.
You MIGHT be able to make a subassembly of the finger. Make it mated to one of the planes, but let it float in the direction it will move in the chuck. Then make four different configs of that subassembly. Put the first one into the chuck assembly and make it flexible. Fully constrain the subassembly planes in such a way that the flexible finger moves inside its subassembly when you drag it. Then pattern the finger. Edit the configuration of each patterned finger to not follow the parent but be a different configuration. That might work.