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Hi Brady. I've been doing this a lot in the past weeks, since I got myself a laser cutter to make custom gaskets and it works like a charm.

Here's how I go about:

First, I create my design in Onshape. There will probably be some kind of flange face.

Then, I create my gasket to fit the flange face. That'll be a sketch made on the flange face and then thickened or so.

Next; I'll create a drawing of my gasket. I put on the dimensions and everything for the shop and documentation. The usual stuff.

After the usual steps, I create a second sheet in the drawing, set scale to 1:1 and delete all the frame and everything that comes with it, to get a blank page.

Then insert a view of my gasket (that is perpendicular to the flat face) onto that sheet. I don't add anything else.

I move that view to the lower left corner of the sheet, for Laser GRBL has the origin in the lower left.

Now, I export that sheet in SVG format.

While SVG can be read by LaserGRBL right away, there is one last obstacle to climb: Onshape will export the sheet boundary as a rectangle, no matter what. This would then be lasered, too, which we don't want. So I open the SVG file in Inkscape and delete the page boundaries. I also have an Inkscape template that has the size of the working area of my laser and a grid to help positioning the cut shapes and some predifined layers: "Engrave" "Holes", "Inner Shapes" and "Outer Shapes".

Laser GRBL will cut the lowest layer first, so I put the geometry on these layers and then engraving happens first, on the new sheet, then holes all over the place, then inner shapes while everything is still securely in place, and only then cut out the outer shapes.

You could just export the original drawing as SVG to LaserGRBL, but that would limit your choice of scale, and it would require you to set a colour other than black for everything but the contour to cut. LaserGRBL can filter for Black, Red, Green and Blue, so that would work in theory, but is less reliable and since the page boundaries and frame would have to be removed anyway, I prefer the approach with the blank page. At that, this will keep the laser countour with the model, update when design is modified, and be available for export at any time.

All the laser owners in this forum: Please support the ticket for enabling sketch-to-SVG im-/export and removing the page boundaries from SVG exports!

A "phantom" sub-assembly should work…
Moving the hinge to a sub-assy should not mess up the mates.
It would be nice to have a way to do this "natively" as it can be tricky to make sure you are using the correct configuration on a drawing.

Each tab has its configuration. This means that if a configured part is inserted in an assembly and this installed part is also to be configured, a configuration must be created in the assembly tab.