You actually can have it all... a house, college for the kids, and junk guns.
Yours sounds very fixable, but there are two paths. One involves paying a pro to do your gunsmithing, and the other is fixing it yourself. Stabbing yourself with a screwdriver is not the greatest start, but there is a lot of info in the archives here including techniques for removing frozen screws without butchering either yourself or your gun. On the flip side is the thought that you might enjoy buying and fixing old guns and end up spending thousands on tools. Or you could be one of those bubbas who messes up decent guns by using the wrong techniques and materials.
Either way, you have come to the right place to either find good information or good gunsmiths. But if a guy called Jagermeister offers his opinion, just remember that you are a beginner who actually owns a drilling, and he is one of those internet fakes who doesn't own one lousy double shotgun. And that is much sadder than poking a hole in your thumb.
Take your time. Learn all you can. Check out the gunsmithing sub forum to help you decide how best to proceed. If you fix your own gun and someone can tell it was repaired... then you didn't do a good job.
I'll try to get things apart and see what I can fix myself. I have plenty of tooling from building ARs and AKs and working on my Mausers. If I need to reshape a top lever spring I have a mill and plenty of files. The screws I might even be able to do by buying blank pins and threading the ends with the proper die. I just don't want to get into a situation where I'm spending hundreds of dollars on a gunsmith who does things to absolute perfection when in reality I just need a couple of small parts to keep this thing running for the amount of shooting I'll do with it in the next 30-40 years.
Thanks for pointing out the gunsmithing subforum, I see a lot of discussion of top lever springs so I'll be sure to read them all.
