Best adjustment is with an eighth inch or so of play at the tire. Loose is LOTS better than tight. You will never burn out a loose bearing, you'll quickly burn out a tight one. So put it back where it was form the factory - that sounds right.
Metal expands when it gets warm. If you tighten a wheel bearing down, it will get lots tighter as it warms up and the lube gets hot and runs out and the next thing you have destroyed it and your wheel falls off. Leave a bit of play and it will never do that.
I tend to remove the zerk off those EasyLube axles and replace with bearing buddies for my customers. Reason being that for a EasyLube to actually grease the bearing the hub has to be 100% full. For the EasyLube to be effective in greasing the bearings you would need lube coming out the inner seal. With a bearing buddy you clean your bearings once a year and repack - easiest is with those cone shaped packers and a grease gun of marine grease. Then every last time, right before you put it in the water, put 3 pumps off a grease gun in the bearing buddy. This pushes the spring out a little on the bearing buddy - exactly what it is designed to do. Then when you back into the water and your hubs quickly cool down and shrink, instead of sucking a drop of water in at the seal it pulls a little spring loaded grease in from the bearing buddy. Do not ever fill the bearing buddies before heading down the road - all that does is by the time you get to your destination all that grease is in the hubs doing nothing except overfilling them. End of the year, pull your hubs and bearings, wash everything out with thinner and inspect, re-grease and off you go for another year. An empty 3500 pound hub is good for literally 90 or 100 trips to the ramp with 3 pumps. And you'll never get water in your hubs.
Rick
