Adjustable front wheel bearings.

Tighten with a spanner until all play eliminated. Spin wheel. Back off half a turn and repeat a couple of times.

Then back off, tighten with bare hands on the nut (or with just the extension on the socket) and back off to the nearest aperture for the split pin.

Pretty well what I'd read about adjusting them. Just checking as I've been told by someone claiming to be an engineer that they should run with pre-load. Now it turns out he doesn't understand what pre-load means. ;-)

It's permissible to set up a pair of angular contact or taper roller bearings with a small amount of preload. In fact you need to do this to maintain stiffness and accuracy in high speed grinding spindles.

It depends on the bearing specification , some require no preloads others require preloads , each vehicle is different , the old Morris marinas used to finger tight only and required regular adjustment , to tight and they would die rather quickly.

Yes, I wasn't suggesting that these should be set up other than backed off to next aperture, just pointing out that *some* rolling element bearings can and indeed should be pre-loaded. Sorry for lack of clarity.

I've got a couple of maker's workshop manuals for cars with adjustable front wheel bearings, and both state they must be set to have some end float. I did once quickly set one to zero end float (the nearest place the split pin would fit) and it overheated and spewed out the grease. ;-) So I set it by the book.

Of course most modern cars have a one piece assembly with built in pre-load. But they don't tend to have as long a service life as the old adjustable types.