Delete Pattern keep Components

I have been absolutely swamped with work and problems but I am slowly getting back to speed.

Really short one today as it's more to push things going but hopefully there's good info you can pick up.

If your design changes and where originally you had pattern of components you now need regular placed components to be manipulated and moved around then here’s a little trick.

                Usually when you delete a pattern all occurrences in that pattern will get deleted and only the first instance of the components will be preserved. The trick is to create the occurrences independent first and then you can delete the pattern which in fact will preserve any components and the position they had even if they were manually moved.

                 For a plant layout I did the other day I was told that the allocated space has shrink and we are now required to fit the units as best we can changing a nice pattern into whatever works. The units to change are quite big and for that matter I had to simplify/derive them to conserve memory and improve performance.

                Along with the sales engineer we took a quick look and moved the components around by the old pick and move routine. When we were pleased with the results I have created each component independent and then I have deleted the pattern. Each component has kept its move location  except for the first item in the pattern that Inventor has dragged back to the original constrained position.

                So you can first suppress the constraints of the main component (or activate defer update) then make each component independent and only then you should delete the pattern.

Later,

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