Well! I've managed my nuts for over forty years without any problems. We old skool brigade managed to nip up nuts with a wheel wrench, common sense should see you all right..
Interesting one this, isn't it? To torque or not to torque? Should the threads be greased or not? If you don't use a torque wrench then how tight is tight? And if you apply even a very light dollop of grease then torque figures are all out the window for a start! As Dave says, I think check tightening almost certainly leads to overtightening - especially with "click" type wrenches - maybe not so much with beam type?.
40+ years ago, when I was "on the tools" in the "big bad city" everything seemed to hinge around bonus times, which boiled down to, the faster you got the job done the more money you earned! I hated it as it encouraged short cuts and devious practice! Back in those days I would have been quite surprised to have seen anyone torquing wheel nuts, it simply took too long. (well, maybe the RR, Jenson, Bristol, Bentley boy's.) Spin them on with your bar straight and then nip them up by bending it over to 90° back on the ground and another quick "nip up" on them all and you're good to go! I would us a "windy gun" to slacken wheel nuts but never to tighten.
We were encouraged to apply a VERY LIGHT smear of Copa Slip to wheel bolts/studs and tighten with a breaker bar. I still have the 14" long (so load applied at 12") Britool bar I bought all those years ago and use it all the time - my oldest friend! Then you have to consider 'how tight is tight?"- Apprentices often used to ask this. We had
#Not tight enough
#Just nice 'n' tight
#far to b****y tight and
#OOPS ! Learning "just nice 'n' tight" is a real skill and is, arguably, the most valuable hand skill you can learn. Once you developed this skill it can be applied to most common sizes of nuts and bolts, although very small ones still need care, and you can use it to "feel" when a lubed fixing is tight enough. Wheel nuts and spark plugs (which I also like to put anti seize on) come particularly to mind.
I do though, tend to torque things like cylinder head and transmission bolts also safety related items like caliper carrier bolts and suspension components. But they are not going to be frequently loosened and tightened like wheel bolts. But then you have to think, torquing, by it's very nature, is measured at the wrench and is a measurement of turning effort. However what you are, mostly, attempting to do is clamp things together. So, having set your wrench to whatever the spec calls for, let's say 25 nm and we consider how tightly your components are going to be clamped together. Consider just 3 possibilities. # lightly oiled threads, # completely dry threads, # damaged or dirty threads. Your wrench is going to click when it applies 25nm of torque (turning effort) TO THE BOLT HEAD! the clamping effort on the parts being held together is going to be very different though. The modern way of seating things with a low value torque setting and then angle tightening is probably better but still has it's problems (think spark plugs, sump plugs, or anything with crush washers?) And, with the popularity of ally sumps these days, stripped out sump threads are common. We, ex-British Leyland chaps, learned all about that years ago on Mini, Maxi, 1800, etc, etc. First sump I ever Helicoiled was a mini!
So. I won't pretend to have the answer but I know what has worked for me for nigh on 50 years now so, for the next few years, until I can't get up off the ground any more, (getting down there is surprisingly easy though!) I'll just be carrying on doing it the way I've always done it - just "nice 'n' tight"!
