I recently purchased the book, "Norton Commando, the Complete Story", by Mathew Hale. I haven't seen any discussion about the book on this forum, and wondered if others have read it, and what they thought of it. I thought the author did a pretty good job of the history of the bike and its technical evolution, and describes his personal experience of restoring a Commando (the Hirider on the cover). I own about 5 books on the Commando, and thought this one was worth adding to the collection. Oh year, Dave Thomas sitting on his S (the image attached to his posts) is captured in this book for eternity. Comments from anyone else who read this?

Stephen Hill
Victoria, BC

Matthew Vale

post97011.html

Right, thanks, correct spelling of the author's name is Mathew Vale.
Funny, I did a search on that name (spelled correctly), and the name of the book, and the search function returned squat. Which takes me off in a related thread. When I do a search, it frequently doesn't show me previously existing content. And often, I get a message that the search function is not available at this time. Why is that? Also, when I back out of search result using the reverse arrow, I get a dead google screen, which if I back through, I may or may not get back to the earlier screen on the forum. Am I doing something wrong, or do others find the search function awkward to use?

Stephen Hill
Victoria BC

The search function does not seem to work all that well on here especially with word combinations. I also seem to drop out of it into odd places.

To help with the searches, I followed hobot's advice and just Google it with 'accessnorton' along with the word or phrase I'm looking for.

Stephen Hill wrote: Right, thanks, correct spelling of the author's name is Mathew Vale. Funny, I did a search on that name (spelled correctly), and the name of the book, and the search function returned squat.

I searched "Matthew Vale" which turned up the original thread.

Stephen Hill wrote:Which takes me off in a related thread. When I do a search, it frequently doesn't show me previously existing content. And often, I get a message that the search function is not available at this time. Why is that? Also, when I back out of search result using the reverse arrow, I get a dead google screen, which if I back through, I may or may not get back to the earlier screen on the forum. Am I doing something wrong, or do others find the search function awkward to use?

Use of the search facility is limited if the person doing the search is not logged in and will time out after showing one result.
If you are loggged in, then the back button (reverse arrow) should work normally to take you back to the search results list

If I do a search of Mathew Vale, with or without quotation marks, logged or or logged off, the only results I get are the previous posts attached to this particular thread. Yet when you searched Mathew Vale you found the original post. Perhaps as moderator you have a higher order of functionality.

Stephen Hill
Victoria, BC

Stephen Hill wrote:If I do a search of Mathew Vale,

MaTThew Vale (not Mathew)
post96503.html?hilit=matthew vale#p96503

search has always worked fine for me. I always do advanced though and switch to topics

I found that the back button did not work with Internet Explorer. Works fine with Google Chrome.

Any ideas why I randomly get this freaking annoying message?

"Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes."

Stephen Hill

Stephen Hill wrote:Any ideas why I randomly get this freaking annoying message?

"Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes."

Stephen Hill

If you search too many time and too often you will get that message.

Sounds about right. Thrashing around with the clunky search function triggers the "no search flag available" message. Cruel symmetry.
I am liking the hobot advice about using google instead.

Stephen Hill