Robot Arm Animation

I had success at making the overall project work, but there were minor difficulties and struggles that I went throughout the making process. First, there was a mesh deforming problem, that when I would animate the object that the size of the mesh would be distorted. Then there was a bone "heating" problem, and it was fixed by separating the objects and then assigning the bones to the object manually. Once the bones were assigned, I joined the object so that it would be easier to fix what bones were assigned to certain vertices. Then, into the animation process, I had a problem between the transition between cycles and blender render. There was a material problem that didn't allow the camera to see the mesh until I would click a certain button in the material tab that allowed me to see the mesh. Another problem that I ran into was trying to switch position in one frame, which cause me to close blender and start all over. It was mainly because I did not have a bone move the whole entire robot arm. More rather that it was that the robot arm bones were disconnect from the base of the mesh of the robot arm.