I work on industrial machines and you absolutely have to take swedish nut lathes to the grinder to get them to fit places.
Harbor Freight IS great because you won't cry fucking up your tools for a one off repair where you would with a pristine expensiver tool.
Torquing specs are engineering suggestions. The enginerds think grease monkeys are dumb and will overtighten something causing the fastener to lose tensile strength, and to their credit a lot of people do torque way too much by hand. Basically you just don't want the screw to come loose on its own and if it squeezes something together that moves you don't want to bind it up. On bolt gun stocks you want repeatability and you could find yourself needing to rezero or come up with new loads, so either tighten everything to the exact same way if you take it apart, or don't ever take it apart.
I work on industrial machines and you absolutely have to take swedish nut lathes to the grinder to get them to fit places.
Harbor Freight IS great because you won't cry fucking up your tools for a one off repair where you would with a pristine expensiver tool.
Torquing specs are engineering suggestions. The enginerds think grease monkeys are dumb and will overtighten something causing the fastener to lose tensile strength, and to their credit a lot of people do torque way too much by hand. Basically you just don't want the screw to come loose on its own and if it squeezes something together that moves you don't want to bind it up. On bolt gun stocks you want repeatability and you could find yourself needing to rezero or come up with new loads, so either tighten everything to the exact same way if you take it apart, or don't ever take it apart.
I agree with the general sentiment of your semi coherent ramblings.