Spline IK with Helix

[LewisNSC]

I am trying to animate a chain of objects uncoiling.

I have 230 segments which are rolled up onto a helix with the following dimensions:

R1 445
R2 905
Turns 12.6

I find that with more than 9.7 turns, the chain starts veering off course and intersecting with itself.

As you can see there is a gap in the bottom right where it veers off but it does eventually correct itself. (Helix - Red, Bone Points - Green, Segments - Grey, Every 23rd Segment - Blue)

I can't reduce the number of segments or the dimensions of the coil as I am replicating a real-world product, but the intention once (if) this works is to extend the spline to follow the path followed after the segments leave the roll and scale the coiled section of the spline using a FFD box to simulate the coil getting smaller as it uncoils (which I do by increasing the % along path).

If anyone can reproduce this (I am using max 2012) and can verify this as a bug with spline IK maybe autodesk can fix it? Otherwise, does anyone have any alternate suggestions to achieve the same result? (The point of this is to avoid using massFX and having loads of keyframes - not to mention when we tried it before we had to do it backwards to avoid it jumping all over the place.)

Any help is much appreciated.

[LewisNSC]

FWIW, I think I fixed it by using normalise spline and setting it to a fairly large number to even out the vertices. I tried something similar with a helix of equal R1 and R2 with a height greater than 0 and It behaved very oddly with significantly more or less coils than I needed for the length of chain. I think there must be problems with spline IK as it seems like it should be straight-forward.

I also have problems with rotating the assembly afterwards, it messes up the orientation. I thought it was related to the up vector, but the only thing i did which helped was deleting the first spline helper node (it was rotating the spline or something, which in turn was changing the orientation of all the links and making big rings of disconnected links instead of coils.