whats a good, safe, and cheap way to get some horsepower out of my 2001 ZR2?

 

use the search function, this question has been asked/answered countless times.

 

Amen to that!

 

Im cuttin off the cat.... good idea or bad

 

Bad. Please read some of the threads discussing this idea.

 

I am new to the blazer's but generaly speaking replace the air intake with a free flowing system just examples, start with maybe a K&N airfilter not sure how available perfomance parts are but you could also replace the intake manifold.
Not quite as cheap but you could either replace the heads with performance heads or just remove the heads you have and take them to a machine shop and get new valves to incude a 3 angeled valve job and port and polish the the heads.
also not sure of the engine specifics but you could probably raise the compression ratio to increase the HP you could probably talk to the machine shop about things that can be done to the heads to help with this.
also you could replace the single exhaust with a dual exhast system and if they make them for this engine headers would help also.
any of these ideas will increase Horse power even by themselves if you can do a combination of all of those you could increase the HP by alot more.
Keep in mind increseing horse power almost always will use more fuel.

hope this helps you or someone else