My best friend also bought a .44 Magnum 1894. His dad had a Winchester John Wayne commemorative with the big loop lever. My friend Karl called me and asked if Marlin made a big loop lever (this was before Wild West Guns even existed). When I told him that they didn't, he decided right then to make one. It helped that his family business had a machine shop with a CAD/CAM and that he was an engineer.
Karl blueprinted his Marlin lever and his dad's Winchester's big loop lever. He overlayed the blueprints and created a work sheet for the internal functioning of a Marlin lever with the Winchester's big John Wayne loop. Then he turned it over to his CAD/CAM genius and put the proper steel into the machine.
Out came four Marlin big loop levers. Before he had them blued, he had his initials, my initials, and my dad's initials stamped on the bottom (he left the fourth lever blank). They all worked perfectly the minute we installed them in our rifles.