I'm working on a recently acquired 1989 Mazda 323 DX hatchback and the brakes are proving to be a puzzle to me. I've removed the calipers without difficulty but I am not seeing how the front rotors come off. I see that they are bolted to the back side of the wheel hub, which suggests to me that the hub itself has to come off. Could anyone point me in the right direction for how to do that?

Thanks!

 

Well, I hunted and hunted and didn't find a procedure for removing the hubs anywhere online. I even looked at a few sites from overseas with no luck. So I invented one of my own and it seems to have worked. I clamped the hub in a vise, set a large socket on the hub, an old bottle jack on the socket, and then chained a piece of steel to the top of the whole mess. Pumping the bottle jack drew the whole knuckle up and off the hub without much difficulty. This gets me to the rotor, but now I have to service and re-seal the wheel bearings and figure out how to put it all back together...

"Pressing" out a 323 hub

 

I don't know about your specific setup, and my Alldata of course doesn't show any detailed information on it (Which is a clue that it isn't anything that ought to be involved or complicated) but I've never seen any vehicle where the hub had to be pressed out of the spindle in order to take the rotor off for replacement. Usually these simply get rusted in place and have to be whacked a few times with a rubber mallet or tapped on the non-contact surfaces with a ball peen to get them to release, OR are held to the front of the hub with two screws that often must be removed using a hand held impact with a large Philips bit as they too tend to get gunked/rusted in place or simply corroded into place.

If there are two screws in the front of the rotor and you did not remove them, then this is likely why they won't come off. If there are not two screws holding it on, then IDK. A picture of the front of the rotor would be helpful.

 

Got it all back together; I meant to take a picture of reassembly but I got on a roll and was eager to get the car driving. It was a relatively simple matter to press the hub and bearings back together. Basically, I set it up exactly as before except that I had a larger socket under the bottle jack to push against the bearing instead of the hub. Also instead of having a bar chained to the knuckle, I set it up so that the hub was supported on blocks on the floor and the bottle jack was pushing upwards against the bottom of my workbench. Using a real press would have been much easier, but this is what I had. I was able to discover that the pre-load on the front bearings is set by a spacer between them. Thinner spacers increase the pre-load and wider ones reduce it. In my case, I was careful to reinstall the bearings back in the positions they came from (after cleaning and repacking them) and just reused the original spacers.

There were no fasteners whatsoever on the front of the rotor, and even if there had been, the rotor could never have come off that direction. In asking around, I was told that early to mid-90's Honda Accords had a similar setup. It's a little hard to see, but in the picture above you can see one of the four bolts that goes through the back of the rotor into the back of the hub.

 

Cool man. I realize this was an older thread and I apologize for the necro. Well, maybe not so much necro. Thought it was older at first. Glad you got it sorted anyhow.