Driving separate skinned mesh armor with main character skeleton.

I have a character that needs to be able to swap in and out different pieces of skinned armor and sync up with the character's animation. Character rigging and skinning was done in Maya. I have tried different script solutions online that combine skinned mesh renderers into one, but causes the main character's mesh to blow up or errors out. Even if the meshes only need 3 or 4 joints of the whole skeleton to deform how I want, do I have to skin all the other joints to the armor meshes as well? I am using Generic type rig on my character and armor import files. The armor points to the same avatar as the characters. Is there a proper way to point to the main character's skeleton as the armor pieces skinned joints so it can be driven by the character's animation controller?