Since this is a mountain bike, is the bottom bracket/crank v2 octalink? With these,the splines are deeper than on Octalink v1, and you can align the splines and then push them manually together a bit to make sure the crankarm is going onto the spindle properly before you use the bolt to tighten things up. In other words, you can engage the splined interface simply by pushing, by hand, the crankarm onto the spindle with Octalink v2. V2 covers all the Octalink mtb cranksets except XTR I believe.