Rigging a shock absorber and so much more . . .

"So much more" might really be an overstatement. In fact, it is.
But there actually IS other stuff in there. As I mention in the vid, I was recently rigging a mechanical "tranformer-ish" guy and had some troubles with the model I got and thought it might be worth pointing out some of the way you could avoid the same issues. Things like how to avoid/deal with the skewing from uneven scaling etc. The shock absorber stuff is in there too :)
Here's the vid:


Maya/rigging: Setting up shock absorber and some notes on mechanical modeling from zeth willie on Vimeo.

Oh and btw, I'm an idiot because I wrote a bunch of code to zero out the rots and trans, then freeze the transforms, then reapply the rots and trans when, in fact, one line of code will do it (never really looked into the arguments for the "makeIdentity" command before. The "scale" flag will just freeze the scale attrs.):

cmds.makeIdentity("yourObject", a=True, s=True)

And of course you could just do it from the menu options for "Freeze Transforms". Geez. . .
But here's the gist of the code to make the single bone stretchy IK (at least it does the annoying parts for you):
zbw_smallIKStretch.py.zip

import zbw_smallIKStretch as sik
sik.smallIKStretch()