[ericand]

Have you considered how you mount your pots? It seems that if you are having mechanical problems with the pot due to load on the shaft, you need to think about how to mount it to have less load. For example, if you are using it to calibrate an arm, it is tempting to tie it directly to the axis of rotation. However, you could put a gear on the pot arm and a gear on the arm axis and use a chain (belt?) to turn the pot.

It is a bit more complex mechanically, but you decouple the sensor from the load bearing mechanicals, and you can adjust the amount of play you need from your pot by adjusting the gearing between the pot and the motion you want to measure.

I think we did that last year with our robot. We had a multi-turn pot to measure the movement of the tube lifting rack. It was mounted parallel to the top of the rack with a gear that transferred the motion of the rack to the pot. I think we lost a pot due to a collision, but never due to rack loading.