Replacing Barrel on a Marlin 39: How hard?

[Big Paulie]

Dear Guys,

   I am thinking about buying an old Marlin 39, but it has a bad barrel.  I think I know of a source to get a replacement barrel. (Or maybe I could get one off an old model 1897)

   If I go forward with this, how hard a job is it for someone to replace the exisitng barrel of a Marlin 39 with a different barrel?   Is this just a matter of knocking out some retaining pins and putting a new barrel in?  Or, does this involve carefully screwing a new barrel into a threaded receiver, and checking and confirming headspace?

   I am not a gunsmith, and I trying to figure out whether this would be a difficult and expensive project.  If it would take a gunsmith more than an hour or so to do, then the cost would probably outweigh the whole matter.

Thanks for any information.

Big Paulie

[gunnut69]

BigPauly--I've included a parts blow up of the 39-a which should be the same(nearly). as you can see the barrel is threaded but the difficult part is indexing. That is gettnig the various dovetails to line up. If making up a barrel were in the game plan you have less indexing problems but have a lot of dovetails to cut.. This would likely be more than a 1 hour job,..

http://stevespages.com/ipb-marlin-39a.html