Charles,
Bongo isn’t really great in this kind of circumstances.
I guess you expect to animate the movement of the assembly part and hope the tube will automatically bend, shift and follow as they would in real life, right?.
Bongo lacks the means to do so.
What can be done is turn the procedure upside-down: animate the centreline of the tube (by means of morphing) and let the assembly part follow.
The trick to make an object ‘follow’ a curve is to Simple Constrain LookAlongZUp it to the curve by one single keyframe at tick 0.
I know it’s not easy to Morph a curve into a fluent move, certainly when it has a lots of control points. Whenever possible I try to reduce the number of control points to as few as possible. Another hint is to use only 2 keyframes (start and end) because the position of EVERY control point is fixed at each keyframe. Moreover there is no modification of tweening possible for Morphing; it’s 3D Cardinal spline and that’s it.
Animate Tubing & Connectors 001.3dm (1.4 MB)
In the model I used Pipe with History to create the tube. Updating the constraints in Preview isn’t flawless. And with History involved remember to continuously press the left/right arrows on the timeline-slider to get a Preview.
Hope this can work for you,
Luc