Torqueing Hub nuts

[sprite2]

Our '94 Mini has been making some scraping noise from the front offside and sure enough when I jacked it up I discovered heaps of bearing movement. However after initialy thinking I was stuck with a bearing change I found the hub nut was only finger tight, though of course the split pin had kept it on.

I re-torqued it to 60 lbft and as always seems to happen it ended up with the hole half way between castellations. However it was quite dry and rusty so I took the nut off and cleaned things up and oiled it then re-torqued. This time I only had to nip it up a bit further to get access to the hole.

Is this OK or should I have backed the nut off to the previous hole, it would have been barely more than finger tight again if I had.

[Plank]

Check the cone washer before tightening, this often becomes damaged if the nut is loose and can give the impression the bearings are worn, when in fact its only a £1 washer that needs replacing.
Then tighten the nut to the reccomended torque, if you cannot reach the torque then F tight is fine.

[GTRMikie]

60 lb ft is the torque figure for drum braked minis. Your car presumably has disc brakes. If your drive shaft has a single split pin hole the hub nut should be torqued to 188-200 lb ft (b****y tight!) then further tightened to align the castellated nut with the hole (that's what the manual says). If your drive shaft has multiple split pin holes the nut should be tightened to 150 lb ft then further tightened to align the holes. (In theory you should first torque the nut with the split cone shaped bush replaced with a large thick washer, otherwise as you torque the nut the split cone bush grips the shaft before the correct torque is reached so any further applied torque does not push the hub further home. Does that make sense??)

[haynes]

oil the threads to assist with achieving the higher torque and as suggested use a large washer (i use an alloy top subframe mount)to pull it through.

[Plotloss]

at 94 its 150ft/lbs I think.

Then a little nudge more to get the split pin hole to line up with the castellation.

I have no idea how you would get it up to 200ft/lbs though. Even at 150ft/lbs it seems scarily tight.

[miniman]

Plotloss said:

...200ft/lbs though

I would consider that to be "FT" - i.e. f f f f fully tight