Pal,, now days you must, must, must,,, put zddp in the oil,,, or lose the engine.... period... unless you are running a roller cam like all the late model cars use.... when all the manufactures went to roller cams, the oil companies dropped the zinc out of the oil they make and did not tell the public... if you run the oil you get now days without putting the zinc back in yourself you will lose the cam and the rest of the engine....i built a engine and did not put zinc in because I was ignorant about the change in the oil,,,, it lasted 3000 miles before the cam went south and the resulting metal chips in the oil destroyed the bearings..... that is how I know....:D:D
When you rebuild a engine, it is always good to xray the rods, cut the caps and recut the bores in the rod to round again... and on a race engine or real high mileage engine , install new rod cap bolts... I had a friend that owned a machine shop ,,,, in that shop he had a chevvy rod that looked perfectly normal,,, when he showed me the xray of that rod , it had a ball point pen inside it.... he constantly found flaws in rods by xraying them...
As for using the torque wrench, it is good that you did,,, when I was doing mechanic work , any time I had a reman engine block to install, I always torqed them before I installed the block,,, quite often, I found rods, mains, head bolts ect. not properly tightened.... recently had a man bring me a Buick engine that started knocking after 5 min. running time on start up.... i found no. 2 rod cap to be ''finger tight''....I check engine tork 3 times before bolting on the pan....
The small block buick engines have cast iron cranks that were tuftrided from buick and the rods are mallable iron not forged steel,,, so everything has to be up to snuff on those assemblies when you put them together or they will fail.... so limit rpm to factory reccomended levels.... not as tough as a nailhead....