How Do I Rig A Measuring Tape?

[freshest]

Hi everybody.

I am about to animate a measuring tape. The tape will move up to a box and spin around it (to measure it).
I want a smooth motion, and therefore I have excluded pure skeleton animation. Insteed I tried a spline animation, and used clusters for the control. It worked fine until I was about to turn the measuring tape around the box corner. When I rotated it more than about 170 degrees it started flipping around it's corner. I don't want that.
It did not work out well to correct this flipping problem with the roll-function on the IK-handle nood, mostly because it started spinning every other time I moved a cluster.

Then I tried placing the measuring tape (with the clusters and ik spline curve) on a motion path, but that did not work out either. I attatched the transform1-node that I got on top of my skeletonchain with the motion curve. My mail problem here was that I could not get the curve and clusters to allign with the motionpath and the transform-locator. The tape turned out looking really strange.

How should I do the rigging for this?

[gmask]

There is a way to deal with the flipping that is interesting but you need to use a hair stroke because you can control the normal at any given point on the curve.

I think there is a thread in the Paint FX section that covers it.