Normally the wax pellet choke bleeds out and the rod collapses into the housing. If it is protruding a bit it should mean it's serviceable. DO NOT USE THE DISTRIBUTOR TO ADJUST RPM/IDLE. This will set up a death spiral of fault diagnosis and to the uninitiated, this means adjusting a bunch of screws to get it to 'sort of run' but have engine misses, lost power, detonation, and generally poor running. This then leads to the 'these engines are junk' mantra. Check timing marks and distributor installation first, set idle rpm off the carb, then proceed with ignition tuning. Once you know the base timing and idle is good, start retuning the ignition to extract better performance.