Blade Centering Advice from STR?

[Big_Red]

STR-

You've mentioned in several threads knives coming in for work that needed blade centering.

I have a Benchmade mini-Ritter/Wilkins grip that is off a bit, functional, not touching liners, but off enough to bother me.

Question is, what could I do to move that blade position closer to center? Before you ask, with the pivot screw unscrewed versus clamped down yields virtually the same blade position. Also, I've swapped bushing washers from one side to the other (same diameter) with no difference.

What else could I try? It's not worth sending back in to BM.

Thanks!

 

[STR]

Yep and somewhere in my sticky posts the one titled tips and tricks has my contribution to the centering as best I can come up with on some knives to help you out. I will say just in case I failed to mention it there (its been a while since I've re-read it) that some knives I've seen from various manufacturers have a set of washers that are different thickness on each side. I don't know the reasoning behind this but I have noted that if you place the wrong washer on the wrong side you end up with a blade off center until you switch them back. This may be some minor way the company final tunes a knife or something to make sure its as good as they can make it before it leaves I really can't say.

There are other times when a stop pin can be overtightened causing the liners to squish inward more than they should and this too can cause weird or even overtight behavior on the pivot tension on knives made this way. On others with floating stop pins if a pin is too long due to the recess for where it seats being too shallow or obstructed this can cause off center issues and you may also wish to check the spacing of both the pivot and rear spacer to make sure they are pretty close to the same front and rear. What that means is finding out the blade thickness plus the two washers. If the blade and two washers together are .185 for thickness and the rear is .190 its fine in most cases. The other way around is fine also but once you get above a 10,000th diff it can start to cause some weird happenings going on in the action, and sometimes the dragging of a blade on one side and so on.

Find that post in the sticky top the page here on page one and you can try what I suggest there. Good luck

STR

 

[Big_Red]

Thanks bud, very much appreciated. I'll dive into that thread head first!