Mcculloch pro Mac 440vc chainsaw issue

Granted this thing is old. My great uncle bought it back in 1987. My dad ended up with it, he was going to toss it because he couldn't get it started. I took it when I bought my house, and got it running with some carb cleaning. Picked up a tree the other day for firewood, had my son cutting it up into useable pieces using this saw, mainly due to it having slightly larger displacement and more power for the size than whatever else I have. No real operation issues, ran for hours except the recoil starter wouldn't engage towards the end of the run and wouldn't fully retract the cord which was odd because it was only restarted maybe 5 times. I was only able to get it to engage by manually reversing the flywheel until it caught. The odd part is nothing appears damaged in any way. I can only speculate heat from hours of use but if anyone has a saw of this series and is familiar with the method of the recoil operation, I'd appreciate input.

Take apart the starter recoil and give it a good clean, remove all the old dirt and any old grease, check to see if any of the parts need replacing if so replace, re-lubricate the parts that need to be and reassemble, should work fine after that.

I have a 555 myself.