if I do end up with shocks with more travel, how hard is it to raise up the front travel?
If the head angle wasn't altered by cutting the frame, it should be relatively easy. The front is sometimes lowered by shorter tubes and springs, sometimes by mounting the tubes higher in the triple tree. Returning to stock tubes, springs and mounting in the triple tree are relatively easy.
The front brakes suck. Rear seem fine. What am I looking at to improve front braking if a new pad doesn't rectify the problem?
The front brake system is simple. I'd pull the caliper and clean it out thoroughly and replace both the piston and seal (and pads). Also, remove the caliper arm that the front brake mounts on to, and remove the pivot pin that allows the arm to swivel. That pin gets rusted frozen easily, so it has to be removed and re-greased. A nice new brake line, banjo bolt and washers are always a good idea if the brake fluid has gone crystalline. And the master cylinder has a piston and spring (and supporting parts) inside that can be replaced with a kit. The fluid return hole inside the master cylinder is very small, and frequently blocked by old fluid, so it must be cleaned thoroughly until it's cleared.
You can upgrade the master cylinder to a more modern one, but some people have reported using a master cylinder that's too large and powerful for the stock front brake pad, which yields so much compression power that the brake goes from zero to 100% (i.e., locked up) with no range in between, no feel, which is also very bad. So, unless you plan to also upgrade to a whole new brake caliper, or dual disks, which people have done, I'd stick with a master cylinder that is comparable to the one that it came with.
Bike has no turn signals-- I'm sure this would be easy to do?
Sure. There are lots of options online.
THe rear brake also stays lit up all the time and does not get brighter when applying brakes. What would need to be done to change this?
The rear brake light has two filaments -- one that stays lit all the time (a running light) and a second one that brightens the light when the brake light switch is closed. That switch is inside the brake lever housing. There's another brake light switch on the right hand side, attached by a 4-inch spring to the foot-operated brake lever.
The front turn signals are configured as dual-filament (running
and signal lights) the same way as the tail/brake light. However, the rear turn signals are signals only, and thus have only one filament.
Anything else I should be looking for or at with this bike? It's clean for the price and runs beautifully.
Hard to say. If it runs beautifully, then do the scheduled maintenance until you identify something in particular that needs attention.
