So here is a little bedtime story for all you guys who mess with Ballard's. This issue of sloppy Ballard's has been around since the earth's crust cooled. 
  A little over 20 years past, I was working in an establishment a little south of the border, (the Montana border, not that other border). We built from scratch a lot of Ballard's. We also did a lot of facelifts to original rifles. One day the boss, alias SPidGe, was showing me an old but nice one sent in for a sagging lever. He had done the longer link thing and new screws. It just wasn't quite enough. I rolled the thing around, considering all the relevant points and nothing was leaping out at me. So he says to me, "let's go see what Ron (Long) has to say." 
  Ron looked at it, got his little ball peen hammer, tapped a few times on the tail of the blocks to bend the corner down, slapped it together and the slop was gone but not quite enough to "snap".
  Fine, except as we both reminded him, this was a large caliber rifle and that tap, tap works fine on .22's. But it only works for a shot or 3 on big calibers. 
  Ron and Steve got into some kind of discussion and I took another look at the action with the thought, "can we drill and tap a setscrew somehow to put some pressure down on the top of the block (and hide it)?"
  And you know what, that hole is already there, right from the factory.
  The front screw hole for the tang sight. 
  So while those two were hypothetically discussing all the aspects of the problem, I grabbed a screw with the right thread, whacked off the head, slotted it with my hacksaw, stuck it in a cordless drill and spun it against a belt sander to approximate the not quite perpendicular angle the screw would hit the block.
   So I stuck it together, turned the screw in, a little past contact. Ran the lever down, pulled it up and "snap". 
"Here you go", and handed it back to Steve. 
   He got a big grin, Ron grabbed it and worked it a time or two. Then they pulled it down to see what I did, (I wasn't telling them). We all had a big laugh. Steve says, "I s'pose you want the afternoon off to run to the Patent Office?"
  Ron says, "You can't patent that, I've seen that little scuff mark the screw left on the block on another rifle once. I remember wondering what did that?" 
  So I didn't get the afternoon off, but from then on, in that shop, it was known as "the Patent repair" and used as needed.
   And we all lived happily ever-after, well mostly happy.