You can try rigging tank tracks with bones which will give you rigid tracks. Quite a bit of work but he covers some wire parameters to help automate the animation, pretty cool stuff. http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/136/1 You might want to switch the spline IK on the main arm to a IK limb solver and use bones, it will…
Arrg precise mechanical real world machines... How about using an IK chain? The base of the chain starts at #2, and the tip follows the tip of the piston. It would probably be pretty easy to push that past its limits and break the effect, but its probably a good place to start. You can probably experiment with a limit…