What a kick-ass update!! Awesome story for sure... and pics too! We love pics.

Love your frame mod. I've often looked at the frame and wondered why they didn't do that to both sides in the first place.

I bet you'll really like the R6 shock. I messed with one on my bike for several months recently and have since swapped to the SV650. It was fun but I know I don't ride in a way that fully takes advantage of all the R6 shock can do. Specific reason you're wanting progressive springs over straight?

Haha thanks!

Yeah when I was taking the engine out the first time I was cursing and grumbling about why they'd decided to skimp on the manufacturing for one more bracket to allow it to be a single cradle. I get they were built to a price, but ease of maintenence is something I value highly enough!

Oh interesting. Is the R6 shock that big of a change? Maybe I should bump it up the priority list a bit

No real reason for progressive over straight, only that I'd have assumed that any stiffer springs I could buy would be progressive so they can put an extra word in the title and make them sound fancier

Even then the only real reason for wanting stiffer up front is cos I heard the R6 shock was stiffer and assumed from car stuff that stiffening up one end and not the other has an effect on under/oversteer

the spring rate thing on a motorcycle doesn't have an oversteer/understeer effect at all like on a car. The reason you get difference in a car is because of roll stiffness and weight transfer from left to right or vice versa. Obviously that doesn't do the same thing on a motorcycle.

Mostly by having stiffer springs in the rear vs. front you will affect the static geometry, and then the dynamic changes to geometry. If your front fork is soft, then it will be statically steeper fork angle, and you will have dynamically more dive and therefore a tendency to steepen even more under load, which will make it twitchy under braking for example, and steeper under cornering forces which is likely the opposite of what you want.  Likewise over bumps the geometry will change the same way. I am no expert (far from it) on motorcycle suspension for the street but on an offorad bicycle I know all about this stuff. Geometry is the most important thing for control and predictable handling on a mountain bike, I presume the same is true for a street motorcycle. In this case it's mostly about matching rider weight and then about balance. With rider on the bike you probably have rear weight bias by maybe 10% I'd guess so if you stiffen the fork by 20%, you will need to stiffen the rear by 22% to maintain the same kind of handling characteristics.

IMHO of course.

Please someone else chime in who actually knows about this stuff. Like Rich Desmond. Because I really want to learn. Funny how nutso sports car / race car guys get about suspension geometry, spring rates, sway bars, damping etc. and how little attention motorcycle guys pay to that same stuff. From what I can tell, at least on this forum, about 95% of the talk of suspension and springs is about appearance... "I want a higher tail" or whatever. Kind of like the low-riders version of MC suspension tuning.

Rich Desmond certainly does know his stuff! He's the owner of Sonic Springs. He helped me with some questions I had when I was buying new springs for my forks. His site has a spring rate calculator you can use to help choose which springs would be best for you.
http://sonicsprings.com/catalog/calculate_spring_rate.php?osCsid=dd1d528cbfb60f2b4608768666fb4655 if you're interested

The stock springs in the forks (according to the wiki) are supposed to be suited for a rider weighing around 120lbs. That counts out even a gal like me a few years ago when I lost some weight from life throwing some stressful sh*t my way lol!

I've been reading sooo much over the past several months and watching youtube videos on how to properly set up suspension... how to calculate the sag in the front of the bike, the rear of the bike... how using the least amount of preload to end up with the proper mm's of sag is best... etc. I'm proud to say that the rear of my bike is finally set up correctly and the front can't be very far off now that I built new forks and swapped them on.

The R6 shock is an upgrade for a few reasons... better spring, color choices lol... but I'm sure many would agree that the main reason is its adjustability. You can adjust not only the preload, but also rebound damping, fast compression damping, and slow compression damping. I downloaded the R6's owner's manual when I had the shock to read about which dial does what... but in the end, I decided that my riding style is never going to take full advantage of all that.

mr72 is right... if there's one thing I've learned from messing with my bike's suspension, it's that stability can become a serious issue really fast... and if you modify one thing, it can have a domino effect, creating the need to modify other things to compensate.

Aah that makes a load of sense. Thanks guys really helpful. Looks like I've got a lot more research to do...

Hum. a 54kg rider is pretty light. Although, as luck would have it I'm about 65kg and managed to cut out about 10kg from the rear of the bike so we're moving in roughly the right direction.

R6 shock not ordered just yet. Definitely enjoying just bombing around on it at the moment

My recent experience might give you some anecdotal information. I had previously upgraded the rear shock to a Katana 600 shock with a far stiffer spring than stock. I initially cut the front springs to stiffen them but I decided they were not stiff enough so I jumped all the way to 0.90kg/mm springs in the front and it made a huge difference. The handling is just much more natural and controllable, even though it's clearly quite firm now. The point is before the rear was very firm and the front soft, now both front and rear feel much better matched.

This confirms my suspicion that the front and rear springs need to be upgraded together in order to maintain handling and correct road feel, which seems obvious to a car guy but it motorcyclists don't really think this way as far as I can tell.