using the combine feature

we recently revamped our process a little bit and saw alot of promise for using the combine feature for our assemblies and sub assemblies inside a multibody part. while playing with it i found that you cant do a combine if the bodies arent touching. is there any way around this? it would be easy to leave the parts touching butwe gap them in the model for weld purposes on some parts, and our angle clips are brought in to the model 2 at a time, pre-spaced just for ease of modeling and some times arent touching the beam they go on

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