My grandfather had an Iver Johnson 38 s&w breaktop in the Alaskan gold rush.
So when I see one at the gun show, if it works, I offer $50. If it is
broken, I offer $35. I think I have cleaned out all the Iver Johnson
break tops in western Washington.
Either that, or the Iver Johnson collecting page got others to buy them all.
http://www2.arkansas.net/~sws1/ij-faq.htm
I kept reading that the were not safe to shoot. I decided to test some
to failure.
The load that did it, in a .1 gr powder work up was: 158 gr JHP .357"
bullet, 7.9 gr Blue Dot. PLEASE DON'T WRECK ANY MORE OF THESE GUNS, WE NOW KNOW THE STRESS LIMIT!
I wrecked couple of the 38 S&Ws with blue dot and a couple 32 s&ws with
Blue Dot.
The book load for 38 s&w is very wimpy, but the failure load kicks
painfully. I found that the rubber gripper grips for J frames can stretch to fit. This helps with the recoil of the 38 super loads it takes to wreck them.
The failure mode when working up .1 gr at a time is always the same: the latch gets loose. The latch is made of a T shaped piece of steel. The hole in the bottom of the T gets elongated.
Per my experience from other types of revolvers, if one jumps to a high load without work up, one can achieve cylinder fragmenting.
I talked the latch situation over with someone who has designed 3 guns that went into production. He explained to me that there are no pressure forces on the latch. The only forces on the latch are bullet friction and recoil on the barrel's upper half. Not being a successful gun designer brain myself, this took hours to comprehend. Now I realize, I should have shot soft lead bullets. They would have had less friction.
After a while learned how to repair the broken Iver Johnsons I bought. The most common problem is not being assembled correctly. The second most common problem is springs. I have not tried the Wolff Iver Johnson pak, but I have bought the V springs from Numerich
http://www.gunpartscorp.com/