Stupid fuel magnet

Today I was flying my 600 and all of a sudden, the engine started to act weird. The sound wasn't right, but I couldn't tell what was wrong and as I was approaching to land the heli and look at it, the engine just died! Luckily, I was able to handle this first forced autorotation from about 25 feet without any problem.


I tried to start it again and it wouldn't start unless I gave it a lot of throttle. Then I just couldn't make it to idle, it was like if the needle was suddenly like 1 more turn leaner....

After looking at everything on the bench, I easily found the trouble, my fuel magnet foam simply desintegreted and a lot of it was stuck in the fuel filter.. making the mix somehow a lot leaner because it was preventing fuel to pass freely through the filter!

I pulled the whole fuel line apart and cleaned everything. I was happy to find that the align 3-way filter can be dissambled and cleaned.

So now I will throw this fuel magnet away and get an OS bubbleless instead. I don't want to think of what could have happened without the filter, foam in the carburator/engine can't be a good thing!

I figured that while flying, the governer was trying to maintain headspeed, but it was suddenly so lean, that it had to lower the throttle so low that it just cut the engine.

So it was my last flight with a stupid fuel magnet!