Tightening bottom bracket stops spindle turning This question was asked a few years ago and the answer, while very useful, is not resulting in a complete solve for me. Here is the previous thread - Tightening bottom bracket prevents crank spindle from turning I am having a very similar issue. I have 68mm shell and a cartridge BB that therefore requires a spacer on the drive side. With the spacer installed there is quite a lot of friction in the spindle when I tighten up the BB. I know that I should be able to tighten both sides fully, so my question is - is a certain amount of friction expected or should the spindle spin totally freely. Any advice would be much appreciated.

The inconvenient truth is that most of the time when a bike is having issues like this, facing and chasing the shell solves everything, revealing that shell tolerance was the problem all along. If it doesn't, you can then and only then know it's a part quality issue. (Even then, "know" is overstating, because it's possible for a shell to be bad enough that piloted taps can't fix it. But that is an outlier situation.)

Some none-zero amount of added friction when tightened is normal. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect it to be looser or literally unaffected. But the effect is usually negligible for a good BB in a good shell.