so this past holiday weekend I got a lot accomplished:
mounted front bumper (mostly, needs a few tweaks)
ran the wiring into the car
mounted the main fusebox in between fenders
mounted the pcm
hooked battery up and checked power ( no electrical fires happened lol)
added some ground wires that were missing.
was able to hook hptuners up and read the tune after adding said grounds
instrument cluster is working ( mostly, more on that later)
trimmed more sheet metal around the radiator for airflow
mocked up some turbo stuff


so I tried to see if it would crank over with the key after just plugging everything in, still need to finish all the mounting braces etc so things were just hanging lol. anyway I can get the cluster to power on, sounds like fuel pump is priming, ive got a bunch of messages in the dash for obvious reasons. when I go to try to start it doesn't crank over at all. I can jump the starter relay at the fuse box and the starter engages that way. I imagine it still has some kind of security lock on it not allowing it to start. I unlocked pcm and flashed vats off and no change other than I don't have codes for lost communication with the body control module/fuel pump supply module, which didn't make any sense cuz I changed nothing on any of that wiring. so any GM CAN gurus feel free to chime in cuz I have no idea how that stuff works. worse case I can bypass the starter to run off a button or something but i'd really like to get all the systems to work like they would normally. I have a friend that works at chevy that has access to a tech2 or something that I'm hoping can override some things to make my life easier but we'll see lol.
overall I'm making some serious headway I'm kind of engineering everything to a point that I can just do a little bit more and finish each thing out when I'm ready. still a lot to do overall but as far as functionality I think I'm getting close.