im doin my brakes and i replaced the rotors.
my question is that when i took of the 1st nut on the hub it was fairly loose. is that right???? i went to replace everything and tighten the nut...but its a lot harder to spin the whole assembly. how tight is it suppose to be???

 

The nut was suposed to be be "loose". With out the pads on the rotor the hub should spin easily. With no tire and no pads I could spin the hub 4 to 5 times with two fingures gripping one wheel stud and spinning my hardest like the wheel of fortune. There is specs for all this. I just completed the same job a few weeks ago. It sounds like you put the spindal nut on too tight. I can tell you how I did the job now or I can tell you how the hanes manual says to do the job in a couple of hours when i get home. Which do you prefer?

 

great thanx.....well my dad just got home with the haynes manual. (left it in his car the other day) i read it but i dont have a spring scale to measure any other way to do this?

 

One good thing about working on brakes is that you can always reference the other side if you have questions like this one. Unless of course you disassembled both of them, then your out of luck but know what not to do next time.
If i remember correctly you are suposed to tighten the nut to a certian torque (some thing small like 10 ft lbs) then loosen it until you get a specific hub play in and out) Then use a spring scale to measure the force to start spinning the hub from a wheel stud. then tighten the nut until a force 4 times the original force is realized. I did have a spring scale or a way of measureing the ultra small hub play spec. So I just tighten the nut to the right spec loosened it until there was a very small amount of hub play. Going back and forth to pin point where the hub start to get some play. From that point I just tightened the nut a half turn. I also compared newly assembled hub to the old one with the two finger on wheel stud spinning it as hard as i could and counting the rotations (wheel of furtune style). I ended up loosening the nut a quarter of a turn or somthing to get what i wanted. This is all off the top of my head and things could be way off (disclaimer).
Get a manual (hanes works great for me) the ten dollars will save you hunders in labor cost at the shop. Plus you wont have to log on to the internet to figure things like this it will all be in the book.

 

its very loose... hand tight then maybe a tad bit more than that.....

 

i go a little bit tighter than hand tight, and spin the hub when you are tightening it, that will help push the excess grease off the rollers