yet more stuff on suspension

Greetings one and all,

I've been following the various discussions on suspension for the SV with some interest, and for better or worse am going down the route of WP proline progressive fork springs + 20W oil with a '06 ZX10 rear shock (thanks to weazelz for the shock) as I can't justify the expense for much else and in all honesty probably wouldn't ever need it. The only bit I was still scratching my head about was where to start from with the shock settings, presuming that whoever had it before me has tweaked and twiddled furiously to set it up for themselves. I found this link through visordown,
http://www.sportrider.com/tech/suspension/
and there's a pretty complete section on their recommended settings for each model / year. Bearing in mind that these settings are intended for a shock in it's original application and not when fitted to an SV, it seemed to me they would be as good a place to start from as any for my tweaking and twiddling. I guess anyone thinking of doing the "GSXR shock on a pointy" mod could find some baseline settings here too.

I think most people say to put the shock to factory settings and work from there.

[northwind]

I've put a couple of other-bike shocks into SVs, and this is what I do. 1) set preload, 2) set the rest to the middle, 3) bounce the rear a few times so it looks like you know what you're doing, 4) ride it a bit. Rebound damping is, IMO, the most important to get right, but the two are closely linked- if you have a ton of compression damping then the shock will compress less over bumps, so less distance to travel on the rebound- you can get away with higher rebound. But, remove the compresion from that, and a slow return is suddenly a problem as the shock will compress more under bumps but return to neutral too slow. This is total tank-slapper material, the bike never recovers from onebump before it hits the next. Learned this by experience

Remember, just because it feels good, doesn't make it right, like in the song- you can have the bike feeling ace till the moment it all goes pear shaped, I did once.

Yep, that's probly the best was to go. But i haven't found the factory settings for the '06 zx10 shock yet. If anybody knows what they are i'll update my post?

ps - Good old skeggy. Grew up there and I do miss it sometimes, but not the toursists.

you'll need to set the shock preload, like I said in PM it hasn't been ridden on since I was fiddling, so it's going to be waaaay out

damping shouldn't be too far out, I didn't change them as far as I remember. it'll be pretty firm I should think, but compression & rebound should be reasonably balanced (relative to each other). you might want to wind them each 1/2 turn out (softer) to start with & see where you go from there

if you have some time, make a note of the shock settings & go out & ride a lap of some roads near you with a variety of corners, surfaces, etc. then wind *one* setting in or out a turn & do it again & see hwo it feels. set it back to the starting settings & change a different setting by one turn. ride your route & see how it feels. repeat for each possible setting, one at a time. take it easy after each change, the handling may change more than you expect!! & if that doesn't teach you soemthing about suspension settings then you'd better buy a harley

The preload as it's currently set (about 17mm of thread showing) is roughly as recommended but i'll be getting my tape measure out when the shock is on to check for that ball park figure of 30mm sag when i'm on it.

Like you and northwind suggest, it'll be a case of small changes to one setting at a time from a baseline combined with a bit of head scratching and further trawls through the forums for advice until I reach handling nirvana.