If you need to look for a job, I would look for one that uses your skills, not based so much on a CAD program. There are days when Inventor has mate issues, same with NX which is much worse.

On your problem, have you removed all mates and started over? Have you looked for other relationships that might be causing additional positional calculations?

Hard to tell without seeing it but it sounds simple if you're talking about a hinge. Should be just two mates, concentric and a coincident or distance mate. Is there a fixed base that it's all attached to. I see some users here that bring in the first part wrong and thus its not fixed in place, so all parts move when dragged.

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Jason
-I don't know if I'm alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering.

"Chuck Norris can speak braille."

Can you attach the assembly here? I think just about every problem like this I have examined came down to geometry that wasn't what the user thought (your ACAD would be first suspect) or user logic error.

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AutoCAD 2013 Certified Professional
Autodesk Inventor 2013 Certified Professional
Certified SolidWorks Professional
http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/content/CAD238/AutoCAD_2007_Tutorials.htm

You mentioned that one of the parts was imported from AutoCAD, my guess is that you are running into a situation where the geometry is not perfect. One thing that can be a pain when mating imported parts is that SW will try to solve all mates out to the 8th decimal place. If you chnage your settings to show 8 decimals you will often see that imported geometry will not be perfect that far out. I often run into faces that are at an angle of 89.99854112 degress or some other odd #. This forces you to get more creative with mates or to make planes in the imported part and use them for mating.

Todd

I ran into this a few years back at my former employer. We used both Inventor and Solidworks and found that when files were imported into SW, edges/faces, etc. would get hosed, typically after the 3rd decimal. We had a benchmark test done on 10 random parts and found SW to create this type of an error in 60% of the files. Considering most of our parts were held to the 3rd and 4th decimal place, we were forced to dump SW in favor for IV for all new work. SW never got back to us with a fix either.

I think there is a setting in SW for accuracy when importing.