Jerry, No shame in being cheap at all, I mean, look at the motorcycles we all choose to buy.
One of the first things I did was pull the exhaust on my Hawk and replace it with the racing pipe MotoCheez recommends. I actually had all the upgrade parts for it before I even had the bike! Conventional wisdom said that I should have broken the bike in and ridden it a bit to get a feel for the upgrades, but I was too impatient for all that. Once I had the bike assembled, I started it stock and ran it up the street once to warm the oil, then I pulled it back in the shop and drained the fish-glue, pulled the exhaust, spark plug, carb, and other odds and sods, and went to work! I'm in Tampa finishing up a few jobs down here, then it's back home for a few days before I have to go to Tuscaloosa, AL for a week. After the new year, I should have a few weeks of local work. That means I can put in a few rides and finish up some work on the Rebel. I'm just a few miles shy of the 500 mile mark on the Hawk, so I'm going to do another oil change, clean the screen, and build a magnetic drain plug for it. I have some craft magnets I picked up for that project. I'm thinking it should be as easy as drilling out the shank of the drain plug and using some high temperature metal epoxy to stick one of the magnets in the end. I'll post on that when I make it happen.