I have a probem which has me really perplexed.

I am a 5 axis CAM programmer and lot of what I do is surface driven and nearly every part I program is required in both left-hand and right hand units. So to make for efficient programming I create an assembly in SolidWorks consisting of the design part and a 'slave' part in which I create my drive surfaces using "offset surface" with a dimension of zero and making sure that the "no external references" is turned on. Often these cloned faces require a little manipulation suct as trimming or inserting split lines to make the faces suitable for driving a cutting tool and this can be a quite involved. Then when the time comes to program the opposite hand (or mirrored part) it is a simple matter of using the SolidWorks 'mirror bodies' function to create the necessary drive faces.

And then the trouble starts as sometimes the act of creating the mirrored faces causes items higher up the feature tree to become corrupt, usually an offset surface feature 'loses' one of the surfaces and then of course the 'child' features all turn red and the job starts to become a nightmare.Checking the contents of the 'Surface Bodies' folder usually reveals that the surface bodies referenced by the 'offset surface' are nowhere to be found and all that can be done is to roll back the feature tree and try and redefine the corrupted features. This causes features lower down the feature tree to become corrupt ans so on ad nauseum!

I haven't even started CAM programming, so it is definately a SolidWorks problem. Has anyone come across anything similar when using SolidWorks? If so, how do you overcome this difficulty or did you just learn to live with it.