I can sympathize, though, with the shop folks not wanting to take your money. When I was working in the vintage motorcycle shop, we saw a LOT of people bring in old bikes they'd bought on Craigslist or some such for $400-$1000 and want 'fixed' so they ran, or ran right.

Unfortunately, those bikes will never be affordable unless the owner can either DIY the repair of have a friend help with it, if only because the parts themselves cost more (sometimes radically more) than the bike itself was worth.

Take my $450 CL motorcycle. All well and good 'til I had to put $160 into carb kits. Labor on something like that would have put the carb fix over $300. ...then there's the head job it needed, the regulator/rectifier that was toast, the alternator I had rewound....

All told, over 4 years of working on it, maybe I could have bought a new bike instead of resurrecting a 30 year old Japanese bike... but worth is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.