Midplane Between Two Planes of Part in an Assembly

[petestrycharske]

All,

I was working in an assembly the other day and due to the way I had derived in some parts, I didn't have origin geometry in a location where I could use one of those planes for a mirror command in a weldment assembly.  However, I did have a central part with two outer surfaces of a "V" that would have served nicely for a midplane for my mirror operation.  Unfortunately, in the assembly environment, I have discovered that I cannot use two surfaces from the same part to create an assembly level midplane workplane.  This seems a little odd to me, so I thought I would put it to the idea station.  I was able to work around this, but feel like this feature should exist without have to create additional work geometry or dive into the part to create the plane.  If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me and follow this link to my original forum post.  Hope all is well and have a most blessed day!

Peace,

Pete

[dan_szymanski]

Hi @petestrycharske,

Johnson provided an explanation to this scenario on the general discussion forum.  The architecture of parts & assemblies vary a bit.  Creating a work plane in an assembly acts much like creating a constraint.  You are unable to create a constraint associated to an identical part, so the same applies in this workflow scenario for work planes.  The workaround, as you have discovered, is to edit the part in place and create a part based work plane on the two faces within your angle bracket.  Unfortunately "fixing" this would be extensive (and possibly not worth the return on investment).  So I am going to change the status of this Idea to solution provided.  Thanks for bringing this to our attention.  -Dan 

[dan_szymanski]

Status changed to Solution Provided.