Going with my theme of underestimating things… this took a while to get anywhere with and it is not quite there yet.
I just wanna mention, I found parenting things to the armature easiest in pose mode… i.e. you select all the objects and then the armature last, go into pose-mode, select the bone you wanna parent to, ctrl-p.
This was my bone setup for the lower arm at one x-rotation limit:
Extended to other x-rotation limit (for now):
Bone hierarchy:
LArm1 and MHinge had similar constraint modifiers:
Donno if “Local Space to Pose Space” is correct, but it seems to give correct results.
Unfortunately, MHinge and LArm1 don’t quite line up when extended…
Because the reference has the bottom arms not quite parallel, this is kinda expected. I would need to do some tweaking once I’m done modeling.
Also, I used the “stick” armature view as I could not find the bone view-port draw scale anywhere… will have to google for that still because massive bones get annoying.