A little blade play and a poor centering should be expected on a BM, unfortunately. That being said, BM seems to be better at centering their blades and obtaining a rock-solid lockup on their larger models. Generally speaking, my Grips have been a crapshoot, but more often than not, my 3.45"-and-up BM's tend to be solid and centered, but the ones below it seem to be more often horrible; all of my mini Grips and 707s have a ton of play and rub more than a full-time masseuse. The one exception in my 7 2.96" models being my 586 LE which is centered and solid.
To be a little more on point though, what I'm getting at here is that I have yet to see a blade centering technique that truly works because poor centering seems to be a product of inconsistencies in the parts used. Ergo unless you correct the microbial inconsistencies, I'd expect the poor centering to come back after a few flicks.
Reeve combats this with exhaustive and expensive techniques used to produce virtually identical, perfect parts.
Spyderco combats this with an absolutely ruthless QC department. I swear their knives feel fear as they roll down the assembly to the QC boys. And consequently even my two friggin Tenacious's are perfectly centered
Benchmade does not appear to combat this at all. For all of BM's strengths, this is not one of them and it's a dangerous gamble to buy a BM without handling it first. But nevertheless, I still love my BM's for the premium beaters that I consider them.
TL;DR you bought a BM, I think you're hooped [emoji6]
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