Hi there, just a quick one…
Any ideas how these would be animated if created in blender… ie… so they open and close… will this require physics or will it work using physics?
it looks very easy to model… just a few blocks and pins…
thanks in advance…
been scratching my head, obviously it would be a nightmare to manually animate…
Obviously…
A few IK constraints, 20 minutes and one or two Copy Rotation Constraints me thinks will do the trick:
tongs.blend (587 KB)
Just select bone “stroke1” and scale it.
You owe me a beer! Cheers. Clock.
^^ This guy knows what hes doing. What do you mean physics? Is it being used in the BGE or in Unity or something? It will need an armature setup (rig) and to be animated to some degree to “work”. Just wondering what you mean by “require physics, or work with physics”?
Also for simplicity you could move all the bones except the above mentioned one to scale to another bone layer (ctrl+m) and then you just have one bone to scale to make the model work.
You cannot to my knowledge do what you want to do with Physics - this is all about bouncing objects off each other, making smoke, cloths, liquids, etc. - you are simply rotating and moving meshes and armatures represent the easiest way. Armatures don’t render, so you can leave them either in the view or on another invisible layer. Once you have keyframe some movements of the bones, just use Play (ALT-A) to see the results.
I did not do all the setup or model the parts in particularly detail - that’s your homework!
Clock.
Nsominia - read this: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Physics 
Oh yes - being a lazy g*t at times, I did not parent “bone-1” and “bone-8” to “stroke1” - if you do this making sure they do not inherit scale or rotation, you can then move the whole rig by grabbing “stroke1” and dragging it about the place.
Thank a lot! Yeah, i just wanted to animate a model i’ve been working on, which uses lazy tongs…
Going to have a play around with that file… Thank Clock! 
Really appreciate that mate!!
You’re welcome - i like mechanical models, so will always help with these.