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In a conventional marine diesel engine the power is produced by hot compressed air igniting fuel sprayed under very high pressure into the cylinder head. A marine diesel engine does not use a carburetor to mix fuel and air or spark plugs to ignite the mixture. Instead it employs the pistons to compress the air to 3000 kPa which causes it to become extremely hot and the fuel is ignited as soon as it is injected into the cylinder.

Some marine diesel engines are fitted with a heater plug in the inlet manifold or a glow plug in the pre-combustion chamber of each cylinder to provide additional heat to the combustion air during starting.

Diesel engines are heavier and slower revving than petrol engines but they are also more reliable because they do not rely on external carburetion or an electrical spark for ignition.

Newer engines use an electronic fuel injection system whereby fuel and air are mixed more thoroughly in the pre-combustion chamber before entering the cylinder. This system maximizes power and fuel economy and is also less polluting.

Every boater should have an understanding of how their engine works so let’s start by explaining the mechanical cycles.

Most reciprocating piston internal combustion engines work on one of two mechanical cycles-either the four-stroke cycle or the two-stroke cycle. These cycles designate, in correct sequence, the mechanical actions by which the fuel and air gain access to the engine cylinder, the gas pressure – due to combustion – is converted to power and, finally, the burnt gas is expelled from the engine cylinder.

The Basic Four-Stroke Diesel Engine

From its name, it is obvious there are four strokes in one complete engine cycle. A stroke is the movement of the piston through the full length of the cylinder and – since one such movement causes the crankshaft to rotate half a turn – it follows that there are two crankshaft revolutions in one complete engine cycle.

The four strokes in the order they occur are:

1. Inlet stroke. With the inlet valve open and the exhaust valve closed, the piston moves from top dead center (TDC) to bottom dead center (BDC), creating a low-pressure area in the cylinder. Clean, filtered air rushes through the open inlet valve to relieve this low-pressure area, and the cylinder fills with air.

2. Compression stroke. With both valves closed, the piston moves from BDC to TDC, compressing the air. During this stroke the air becomes heated to a temperature sufficiently high to ignite the fuel.

3. Power stroke. At approximately TDC, the fuel is injected, or sprayed, into the hot, compressed air, where it ignites, burns and expands. Both valves remain closed, and the pressure acts on the piston crown, forcing it down the cylinder from TDC to BDC.

4. Exhaust stroke. At approximately BDC the exhaust valve opens and the piston starts to move from BDC to TDC, driving the burnt gas out of the cylinder through the open exhaust valve.

The Two-Stroke Diesel Engine

The two-stroke engine uses two piston strokes to complete one power stroke and, therefore, fire twice as often as a four-stroke engine. A two-stroke engine is smaller and simpler with fewer moving parts. A two-stroke engine has the potential to produce twice as much power as a four-stroke engine of the same size, however, because of the extra fitting required in a two-stroke diesel engine, for example blowers and governors, they become more expensive to produce. There has been a shift towards four stroke diesel engines which have become more efficient and smaller.

Protect Your Marine Diesel Engine

Protect your engine by avoiding long periods (more than 10 minutes) of idling in a “no-load” situation. This is often done to charge batteries or cool refrigeration but if done repeatedly it will glaze the bores of the engine and cause premature engine failure. If the vessel is in a berth the engine can be put in gear to create load at idle.

All boat owners should have an understanding of basic marine diesel engine maintenance to keep themselves and their families safe on the water.

PPC Search Engine Search engine marketing is fast becoming one of the easiest methods of marketing your products and services via the internet. Although as a medium the Internet is an indispensable tool yet the whole marketing shebang is quite difficult because your audience is a nameless and faceless entity that you really don’t know anything about. All you know is that a certain type of website appeals to a certain type of user but that’s about it.

When you go about physically marketing your products in the real world there are a number of marketing techniques that you can use but in the case of Internet marketing the options are limited.

The best and the most versatile tool available to businesses on the net is the Pay per click search engine marketing technique. This technique has its roots in the Pay per click concept.

What is this pay per click concept? Let’s take a look at it before we proceed any further. Pay per click basically means that you have a banner or an Icon that is displayed on the website of a related service provider or on a search engine results page. When the banner is displayed on a Search engine results page it is referred to as Pay per click search engine marketing.

Whenever someone clicks on that banner or Icon the advertiser has to pay the person carrying that banner. The payment is calculated on the basis of the number of clicks that the banner receives.

One issue that all new Pay per click search engine marketing users are unable to digest is the issue of fraudulent clicks that can jack up their bills. When you go in for a pay per click search engine marketing option you should gather as much information about that pay per click search engine marketing option as possible before you actually hand over any money. This will save you the frustration and embarrassment later. One thing that you need to remember is that the search engine marketer should have a fraudulent click grievance redressal system in place.

If you are thinking about Pay per click search engine marketing then the first thing that you need to do is decide when and where you are going to advertise. By “when” we mean in which season. By “where” we mean on which search engine marketing tool.

The most popular and versatile pay-per-click search engine on the internet with wide reach is Yahoo! Search Marketing ( this was previously known as Overture), which provides paid results to many of the major search sites such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo! and Lycos.

Another very popular program is the Google’s Adwords program. This program will give you access to the search engine result pages of Google.

The two search engine marketing programs are the best in the field and will give you the best possible results. Another search engine marketing tool that is very popular in Europe is Espotting.

The major drawback with using these search engine marketing programs is that if you want to go in for some of the more popular search queries, these search engine marketing programs will prove to be quite expensive.

In case you have budget constraints the smaller PPC services may be able to help you out. This is a fact that most of them do not reach any of the major portals, but they do deliver results to a wide range of metasearch engines, and you will get desirable results for a very reasonable price indeed.

You would do well to remember that although organic Search Engine Optimization may generate traffic, it is not “instantaneous.”

By making use of search engine marketing programs such as pay per click, you can receive the desired results and clicks a few days instead of months.

If you want to get instantaneous results it would be highly beneficial for you to have a PPC Search Engine Advertising. pay per click search engine marketing program for your targeted keywords even if it is on a smaller Pay per click service.

It has been 114 years since Rudolph Diesel applied for a patent for his new improved engine. It was hoped to replace the gasoline engine but as we can all see that this has not happened. The gasoline engine having just been invented in 1876 was still considered inefficient in fuel consumption and power. An evaluation of each engine’s performance tells a story that is difficult to reconcile with the way things have shaken out in the beginning of the 21st Century. The invention of the Diesel offered the world a far more efficient and effective fuel based engine. It actually provides more horsepower per gallon or liter than a gasoline. This is why diesel engines power our large earth moving equipment, trucks, marine engines, low mileage cars and now aircraft.

The diesel is a combustion injection engine. Unlike the gasoline engine, air is compressed first and then the fuel is injected into it. The compressed air is hot enough to ignite the diesel fuel without the use of a sparkplug. Diesel engines developed out of the earlier work surrounding two engines; the original diesel design and the solid injection system of Herbert Akroyd Stuart created in his hot bulb engine. This means that the upward stroke of the diesel engine compresses the air to where its’ temperature is between 1300-1650° F. When the piston has reached the top of its’ upward stroke, diesel fuel is then injected, combustion occurs, pressure increases and pushes the cylinder downwards. This motion is transmitted by means of the connecting rods to the crankshaft which itself turns thus transmitting rotating power to a drive shaft which powers ships, cars, generators, aircraft and even motorcycles.

During cold weather, diesel fuel thickens when the wax crystallizes. It becomes a gel and the fuel injection will not easily work. Technological advances have made this a problem of the past. The fuel lines and fuel filter can be pre-warmed, others use a glow plug in the combustion chamber to pre-heat its’ walls, some use resistive heaters in the intake manifold to warm air taken into the combustion chambers and engine block heaters are used in areas like Kansas or Nebraska when automobiles are left in the cold overnight.

Diesel engine speed used to be controlled by governing the rate of fuel through a gear system. Today the use of electronically controlled engines ECM (electronic control module) allows diesel engines to adjust their timing to start according to the environmental conditions of heat and cold, regulate the engine speed in terms of RPM (revolutions per minute) and maintain fuel economy.

Diesel engines may not have beaten its’ chief contender, the gasoline engine, but it has kept ahead in terms of heavy machine and naval engines. It has recently performed outstandingly in the area of remotely piloted vehicle engines, set amazing land speed records for racecars and motorcycles. The diesel engine has improved amazingly in the past 114 years. The use of electronics has given all engines abilities of fuel conservation unheard of in past years. This makes the diesel engine a real budget-winning contender. This year the new 2006, Volkswagen diesel won fourth place in the best mileage evaluation according to http://www.fueleconomy.gov. Diesels may prove to be the green vehicle engine of choice in the future since they have very little carbon monoxide emissions. Catalytic converters and diesel particulate air filters have made diesel engines free from particulate, nitrogen and sulfur oxides. Diesel engines may prove to be the easiest solution to greenhouse gases.

Have you heard stories about legendary online entrepreneurs who hit it big after getting a #1 rank in several popular search engines? You probably wondered what it would take for you to achieve that elusive #1 spot in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in ensuring that your business gets the best possible search engine ranking, which can lead to increased sales for your online company.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

Impact of High Search Engine Rank on Sales

Internet market research estimates that between 70% and 90% of online shoppers use search engines to find a specific product or service. Let’s examine factors that influence sales to see how effective search engine optimization can boost your revenues.

Three metrics are required to forecast online sales: the average ticket, the conversion rate, and the amount of web site traffic:



The average ticket is the amount of money spent by a customer on a typical transaction. Computer and electronics stores have high average tickets (hundreds or thousands of dollars), while bookstores have low average tickets (tens of dollars).



Web Site traffic is measured by the number of site visitors, typically expressed as the number of page views per month.



Conversion rate is the number of sales divided by the number of page views per month, expressed as a percentage.



Let’s look at an example. The Ultimate Taupe Widget (UTW) store has an average ticket of $25, a conversion rate of 2%, and gets 5,000 page views per month. The estimated monthly sales are $2,500 ($25 average ticket * 0.02 conversion rate expressed as a decimal * 5,000 page views per month). Achieving a high search engine rank will increase the number of page views, and therefore increase sales. In this example, if traffic doubles to 10,000 page views a month, UTW’s monthly sales should (approximately) double as well (to $5,000).

Keep in mind that a high search engine rank will produce a measurable increase in traffic only if there is significant marketplace interest in taupe widgets and your web site appears in the first thirty search engine results.

However, search engine optimization is not going to produce measurable results if there is very little demand for taupe widgets. The #1 spot in search engine result pages is not particularly impressive if only two people search for “taupe widgets” each month. Role of Keywords in Search Engine Optimization

Keywords are words or phrases users provide to search engines to locate information. Search engines examine page content to determine whether a specific page is relevant for a particular search word or phrase. Thus, effective keyword selection is one of the cornerstones of search engine optimization.

Each keyword is characterized by supply (number of search engine result pages) and demand (number of searches). The easiest way to improve search engine rank is to select keywords that have favorable supply-demand characteristics; that is, ones with a relatively high demand and a relatively low supply. It is much more difficult to improve the search engine position of a page on a high supply, competitive keyword.

Good keywords must be relevant to your product line, as well as your line of business. A #1 rank for “navy widgets” is worthless if you sell taupe widgets exclusively. A potential customer will find your page, quickly discover that you don’t sell any navy widgets, and promptly go elsewhere. In effect, the conversion rate for irrelevant search engine hits is very close to zero.

Using Keywords Effectively

Choosing a set of target keywords is the first step in search engine optimization. The second step is using them in the body, title, headings, and meta-tags of a page.

Include the target keywords in the text of the page. Don’t overdo it, though — the keywords should fit smoothly into the surrounding text. Search engines use several techniques to detect excessive keyword density, or too many keywords stuffed into very little supporting text, and will reduce the rank accordingly. A page has too many keywords if they interfere with the general flow of the text on a page and appear to be glaringly out of place

The title tag should contain information that describes the page. Unless you operate a multi-national conglomerate that is already a household name, your company’s name is not a descriptive title. Most search engines use the title tag as the first line of your listing in the search engine result pages. Strive to make your title tag say “click me” to a prospective customer. “Superior taupe widgets – 50% off every day” is a good page title, while “Ultimate Taupe Widgets, Inc.” is not.

Incorporate keywords into the headings on the page, as well as into emphasized sections (bold or large text). Even though search engines are de-emphasizing descriptive meta-tags, include keywords in them nevertheless. The description meta-tag should have an accurate description of your page, and the keywords meta-tag should contain a set of keywords (separated by commas) that list key concepts mentioned on the page.

Understanding the basics of search engine optimization is an important first step in creating an optimized, well-positioned web site.

The diesel engine is fast becoming on of the more economical choices for individuals. With the rising costs of fuels, it is seen that diesel is still one of the more affordable options. It in the best has generated a reputation for being very much a major source of pollution but in recent times has been cleaned up to a great extent.

The biggest advantage of the diesel engine is seen in the fact that the fuel is much more economical. The diesel engine gives a lot more than the gasoline engine for much reduced costs. There is an approximate advantage of using diesel of as much as 30% at times. There is less fuel consumed for the same task and you therefore do not have to refill your tank as often.

The reason many persons do not opt for the diesel engine is in fact the initial start up costs of installing such an engine. The extra costs are quite high for the engine and its installation. If you however look into the savings overall the diesel engine will in fact be the more economical choice.

It is seen too that the vehicle that is installed with a diesel engine will retain more value than the gasoline engine. This is due to there being a demand for vehicles that are fuel efficient on the market as the cost of fuel continues to rise. The diesel engine vehicles also tend to stay on the road longer. If properly maintained these will outlast the typical gasoline engine.

It can also be seen that the diesel engine will give a different drive from a gasoline engine. The vehicle running on a diesel engine will have more of a zip too it. The vehicles will also have more power for tasks such as towing as the diesel engine can handle more load.

There is also another downfall associated with the diesel engine. This is the fact that it is much noisier when compared to the gasoline engine. This noise level is however no where as loud as the past and is in fact quite bearable to users. In fact most of the typical drivers on the road will not be able to tell the difference between a diesel engine and a gasoline engine.

Emissions continue to be a cause for concern for the environmentally conscious. It is true that the diesel engine has come a long way from times gone by in terms of emissions but it is still dirtier than the gasoline engine. There is more visible pollution from the diesel engine and this is due to the fact that the diesel engine will throw out more particulates from the exhaust tailpipe as well as more nitrogen oxides. There is however less carbon dioxide pollution. This is a tradeoff but it is the dilemma that many persons face when choosing between the gasoline and the diesel engines.

One of the other concerns when dealing with the diesel engine is the fuel availability. The diesel fuel is commonly found at truck stops on highways bit is not as common in neighborhood service stations. It is vital that consideration be made of where you will source fuel for a diesel engine. It is also seen that there are not that many options when purchasing a diesel engine car so the choices are limited.

Search engine submission tools are excellent tools when it comes to getting our websites indexed in the search engines. Such tools can either be provided by search engine submission services or in the form of software. What they can do for us is rather straightforward – submitting our website details for inclusion in the search engines. Why is it so crucial that we make use of these search engine submission tools?

There are a few reasons why we submit to search engines. One reason is to get our websites indexed as quickly as possible. Indexing is important so that people can locate our websites in the search engines. Websites that are not indexed cannot be found at all, so it doesn’t matter even if we have built a 1000 page website. Indexing in search engines is powerful because search engines network with one another. Once it is picked up by one search engine, the rest would slowly catch up. One trick is to submit your website to MSN, as they allow you to suggest websites for their search engine spiders to explore. MSN tend to index websites faster than Yahoo and Google. Once your website is accepted and indexed in MSN, the rest would follow shortly.

Another reason why we submit to search engines is to optimize exposure of our websites. There are literally hundreds to thousands of small search engines which you may not have heard of. Some of them are in collective partnership with the major search engines, so there is an intricate network of search engines that interact with one another. Pitting yourself against big-timers or established websites in the major search engines can be a draining and most of the time, unrewarding journey. Submitting to the small search engines and getting them indexed gives you greater opportunities to rank high in them.

While submitting to smaller search engines is an excellent idea, webmasters also understand it is a chore to submit to the search engines one by one. It feels like eternity to submit to hundreds of them. People by nature don’t like repetitive tasks especially you are one of those who hate to perform data-entry tasks. The solution is therefore to employ the services of search engine submission tools like search engine submission services or software.

There are many choices in the internet but unfortunately, some of them charge an exorbitant fee to submit your website. Unless your pockets are deep or your returns from search engine submissions far exceed your expenses, you would find using search engine submission tools barely a good investment or website promotion method. Naturally, there are also some unscrupulous services that employ unorthodox or blackhat search engine submission tools to spam the search engines and their network partners with your website details, getting you banned rather ranking well. Discover what the cheap yet effective options are at my blog if you are looking for affordable search engine submission tools.

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