Zeth Willie updates his site with a brand new look, and also posts a look at one possible way to Rig a Shock Absorber in Maya Using Joints, and provides some tips and suggestions for creating mechanical type of models in Maya with consideration for the rigging process.
This goes through some of the things to keep your eyes on with mechanical modeling and then one way you can set up a shock absorber using joints
Zeth uses an example of a pneumatic actuator-like object that is connected to a hinge and shows how you can rig it all up and have it work as expected using Maya’s Joints and mentions how to avoid with skewing that might occur from random and hidden scaling values giving you double transforms in your hierarchy. Check out the tutorial for Maya Rigging Setting up shock absorber and some notes on mechanical modeling here.