Rig rotation unwanted 90 degree pop/snap

I’m sure this is an age old rigging pitfall, but I don’t know what to search for.

I have a simple rig for controlling a floating robot, but the bone that I set up to to be the master rotation bone (rotate01) is sluggish and will snap or pop the child bones to a 90 degree angle when its limit is reached. I didn’t intend there to be any limit. It should just be a free rotation. I’m attaching the blend file.

As long as I’m attaching the blend I’d like to know if anyone can tell me why my “custom shape” mesh (on layer 2) has to be so big relatively. If the armature was a mesh I would think it would be related to not applying the scale, but I don’t think you can apply the scale of a bone/armature can you?

I’m still a rigging noob. Any advise would be appreciated. Thank you.

rotPop0101.blend (620 KB)

On your rigging, you have your quaternion angle locked on W. Change to euler or unlock it and I think that is what you want.

PS. Follow this method of making your custom bone shapes align. You can then scale down your custom bone shape in object mode after you are done to whatever you want. Just don’t set the scale back to one (control A - scale). The bone at one will follow the mesh at one. So after you size it to what you want, don’t set the scale.

Oh jeeze. I knew I didn’t understand quaternion rotations, I just didn’t know that I didn’t understand them to this degree. Thank you StillTrying!

Also thank you for the edit for making the custom shape scale cooperate StillTrying! You’ve been a great help!