My buddy and trusted gunsmith has conceded that despite numerous new parts including the carrier, my pre-cross bolt Marlin .44 will not feed reliably, although it will chamber a round from the magazine, it is a tricky affair, and no good for quick follow up shots and certainly not for CAS.
Looking at the schematic's of the "old" 1894 design vs. the "new", I notice that the carrier rocker of old design uses a flat spring, while the new shows a coil spring. The internals have been polished, one piece firing pin installed, Magic Spring, lever cams have been radius (ed), everything a good action job would have done, yet this is the first of hundreds of Marlin's my buddy has worked on that refuses to feed smoothly no matter what ammo or bullet design is used. Made in 1976, so Marlin won't take it back for fixing. Could the carrier rocker be the problem? Has anyone heard of this kind of be-deviling problem in a PCB .44 mag? Need help, the wood is too pretty to just hang on the wall!!!!!!!

I had a 1975 Model that had the same problem. I ended up getting an old style carrier for a 44-40 from www.gunpartscorp.com that cured my problem.

Lee L.

Is the old style a vast departure from the new "fits all" design that Marlin sells?

Carrier will not come up enough and align the shell so bolt can close and center round into chamber, thus it jams.

The carrier rocker notch was in a slightly diffrent position, letting the carrier come up further, and providing better allignment of the cartridge.

Lee L

If you have access to asecond lever, you might try that. it could be a mismatch with the actuating arm and the carrier rocker.

Lee L.

Thanks, we are trying a new lever and checking to see if the old carrier rocker is being used or a new model has been installed. If it is the carrier rocker, Marlin said that the spring should be replaced, from the flat to coil type in order to work properly with the new style carrier. I nnoticed that the lever was very worn, perhaps from use or a bad gunsmithing job long ago, so the snail shaped cam the lifts and oprated the carrier may have had too much metal removed before my buddy got to it. I'm hoping for the best, as if this doesn't do the trick, he refunding my money and I'll be sending it to another smith who advertises his action jobs for Puma '92's as well as Marlin's. After exchanging e-mails he's confident he can fix it, but I'd rather just get it back in shooting condition now instead of waiting. Heck, it's been a year since I started this "little" project!

If someone has done more than polish the actuating arm on the lever, that could possibly be your trouble, it doesn't take much metal removal to alter the timing of the elevator, someone had worked on a 1893 and it would not always cock when the lever was worked fast, so I got it for $100. When I got it home I discovered that someone had tried to polish the leading edge of the hammer and the cocking lobe on the bolt. they had removed too much material, and the hammer would not rotate far enough to go to full cock, but worked fine when thumb cocked. Only had to remove .002" to .003" from the trigger contact to bring it back into service, so you can see that polishing means just that polish without removing any more material than necessary. I hope this information helps.

Lee L.