Toyota Repair: Toyota Pick-up starting difficulty, freeway speeds, toyota pick up truck

Question
This question is related to a 1985 Toyota pick-up truck/2 barrel carb 4 cylindler 2344cc. engine with automatic transmission. The truck has developed starting problems and I have replaced the igniter with a new one and the coil wire leading to the distributor/further the plug wires are all correctly installed and about two years old. The truck used to start easily on the first turn of the key but it is now at least two to three turns of the key and some stalling occurs if the engine is not warmed up. Just pulling out into the street it might stall. After the truck is warmed up and running it has no trouble reaching freeway speeds of 65mph and does not backfire, stumble or hesitate. But it does have a lot of difficulty getting started and that has become worrysome. The sparkplugs were changed about 500 miles ago to a Champion truck plug and the air cleaner is new. Can you inform me on what systems to check for this starting up diffulty? thanks this truck has 225,000 miles.

Answer
Possibly a carburetor problem, two things you need to check, make sure the choke is working, it sounds like maybe it's not, it should be closed almost all the way when cold, push the gas pedal down all the way once and remove the top of the air cleaner and check to see if this is happening, if not the butterfly may be stuck in the open positiopn and it needs to be freed up, the other thing is the accelerator pump circuit, make sure there is fuel spray into the throttle bore from the accelerator pump when opening the throttle.