You'd really wish you hadn't sold it to me if you could shoot it now...I pulled it all apart and spent some hours slicking up the internals, you were right about it being stiff as could be. I wish Marlin had never started plating their bolts, that was a lot of the problem with it, the stuff is coming off. I feathered the rough edges of where the plating was coming loose, deburred the bolt ways, worked on the other stuff inside and it's slick as a whistle now.
I haven't put a scope on it yet, kinda like the peep, though I must admit I haven't learned to shoot it very well, might do better with a narrower front blade and some orange-over-white paint, and a smaller rear aperture.
Charles, those older Marlins are tough to beat, I have a 1966-produced 336 Texan that my grandfather bought new somewhere in Harlingen. You may have actually known him, his name was Collins Wickham and he was a high-school chemistry teacher and Baptist minister there, starting several churches from scratch in the poorer, Hispanic neighborhoods of surrounding areas from the late 1960s through the '90s when he retired. He was known for being the pasty-white gringo who delivered his sermons in perfect, Castilian Spanish.