Switch from Paste to Paste New at a Later Time

[Anonymous]

I am working with many similar components, akin to building with lego.  Currently I have a top level component which houses the base components which are then copy and pasted into other components.  As the design progresses, some of these need to be edited but are in a referenced state at that point so hard to swap out.  I would like to do something similar to breaking links when you have referenced components outside the assembly.  Breaking links has proven unreliable once parts are referenced though, so that isn't ideal.

Is it possible to switch from Paste to Paste new at a later time?  Ie break a paste link?

[n8bot]

You could paste new a new version of the component in, align it exactly with the old one, and then remove (not delete) the old one, to save any links that are dependent on that old component.

[TrippyLighting]

While I am responding to your other post, could you describe, maybe on a more concrete example how these are edited ?

What I am getting at is that you can make feature configurations in Fusion 360 where you have a base design and ten a duplicate that still has a link to the base design, but added features.

[Anonymous]

I did not know that fusion could do configurations yet (thought it was part of branch and merge), but taking a look at the screencast below I can see that this can be done by just copying the body and editing it from there.  Is this still the way you would go about it?

[Anonymous]

I appreciate the idea, but then if I need to shorten or lengthen a part later, it becomes cumbersome.  I need to unhide the original component, shorten it, then activate the new one, shortenit, and hope that everything stays aligned.  It is not a very robust way of modelling, but thank you for your help! 🙂

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

Here is a link to the class I co-hosted at Autodesk university with @jeff_strater . There is a section in to on Configurations (light). these are not as powerful and flexible as in Solid Works but can be very handy.

This is a link to the slightly updated handout on Google docs.