[Jeff_H]

First of all you need to pick up a good diesel engine primer because these are extremely basic questions and if you own a diesel long enough you will need to know a lot more about it to use the engine safely. A good book on the topic is Nigel Calder''s ''Marine Diesel Engines''.

When the compression relief valve is open it allows air into the cylinder. This effectively reduces the compression of the engine to near zero making the engine easy to turn for the purposes of getting the engine up to starting speed when hand starting the engine or starting the engine on a low battery. Since a diesel needs high compression to ignite the fuel, it cannot actually run with all of the compression relief valves open. In normal operation the valves should be kept closed and you should have no reason to open them.

You can only read the oil level at the dipstick. The oil filler opens to the valve gallery and a probe through the filler hole cannot reach the sump (bottom of the engine where the oil is collected). You need to get your dipstick out. On many marine engines the dipstick is screwed into place although that is unusual on small diesels where they usually just have a rubber stopper that is integral to the dipstick. If you are having that much trouble extracting the dipstick, there is a chance that you are actually trying to extract something other than a dipstick. At some point soon, you will also need to extract the dipstick in order to change the oil in the engine.

Jeff