yeah, here I am. Pretty much on cue...
I'm a bit too predictable I think.
Tinkering is great. It's the only way to learn. You do not have a collector's rifle. Altering it's condition is not really important. Getting it shooting is important.
If the wood is dark and w/o finish, is it oil soaked? Is the wood to metal fit good - real good or sorta good? If it's oil soaked it can be deoiled (mostly) and then refinished. Probaby bedded at the same time. Then refinished eventually. (there are better and worse sequences of restoring). You can also find pretty inexpensive replacement wood that you can refinish yourself with very little extra fitting.
You can reline the barrel to any of the .38-55 parent cartridge cases. Nothing like a .38-55 lever gun in my opinion, but take your pick when you reline as long as it's a derivative of the .38-55. 32-40 is another sweetie (straight sided cases have some legalistic hunting advantages). Relining will replace the chamber entirely - that's good thing. Do it right.
Another, cheaper option is sending the barrel off to be rebored to a larger caliber. This can be done by outfits like "JES Reboring" (it will google). I'd go up two calibers at least - so from .25 to 32 or 38, but not .30. However, the .30 may be doable if you want a .30-30.
Is there pitting or deep dings on the metal, esp, the action? Can they be polished out? If you want to learn to polish correctly you can repolish the metal, even have some welding done to fill pits and then send it off for case colors. The polishing is the hard work.
Ditto the barrel, however, you can also do the rust bluing yourself with a very small investment for equipment.
So, there you ahve a short synopsis of the options. You can shoot for something like a "like New" final product or you can keep most of the patina and opt for totally functional, shoots like new, rifle that still looks like a 120-yr old piece of unknown, but not unimaginable, history.
Have fun and make it what you want. Not what someone else thinks you should do. If you put some sweat equity into it, you will find that everything you kill with it tastes just that much sweeter and is just that much more fun and interesting.
Life it too short to hunt an ugly gun, but it's also too short to hunt with a new, off the shelf gun that will never be interesting until you are done with it.
