Reassembly was Much More Difficult than it Should Have Been

[Sharperthansticks]

Last night I was disassembling my Kizer Eliminator to clean it out, relube it, and put it back together again. It's practically brand new, but because I'd used a Dremel to modify two hot spots ((1)a sharp corner where the locking part of the frame departs from the rest of the scale, and (2) a finger choil that was not wide enough and that terminated in a rather sharp burr), there was grit from the grinding stone in the action.

The knife is simple and consists of two slabs of titanium, a blade, a pivot screw, two races of captive bearings, and three stand-off screws. (Technically, there are more screws, but they stayed in one of the scales, so I'm not counting them.) The whole knife should have been easy to get apart and get back together. Well, it was easy to get apart, and in a sense, it was easy to get back together, but every friggin' time it was reassembled, the blade was way off center. I disassembled and reassembled it several times before the blade magically fell dead center again. Before that final attempt, I could see that something was amiss at the top of the scales: one scale bulged out, for some reason, until finally, on the last try, it didn't.

I'd rather not go through that exercise again. Any ideas on what was messing up the reassembly process?

 

[SKB182]

When you were tightening the pivot and body screws was the blade in the opened or closed position?

 

[Sharperthansticks]

I tried it various ways--closed, opened, and half-opened--until it finally worked.