MakerBot Industries

I am trying to design the components of a small a scroll expander engine (Wikipedia scroll expander) in cad that can be printed using a Cupcake. However, because the design cannot be created by simply using a set of simple circles and rectangles, I'm running up against the extent to my knowledge of cad programs. Before I commit a large chunk of time to learning blender (Or is there a better opensource alternative? I had been using free-cad but it was proving too buggy), I want to know whether there are any easy ways to extrude 2d images into 3-d objects. Its seems like this aught to be fairly simple and yet I haven't found anything out there that does this. It was fairly easy to create a 2-d version of the bottom part of the device (Tried to attach an image or this but the forum would not let me… a shortened url is all I could achive, sorry) using inkscape. If anyone knows how to expand the different colored shapes of this image, different amounts in the z-axis and to put precise dimensions on them, I would be delighted to gleam that knowledge. Thanks. www.otherrealm.org/images/2dBottomInkscape2011-10-03-2016-small.png

I had downloaded Autodesk 123D but hadn't really looked at any of the video tutorials and for some reason wasn't really considering it as an option. Having just looked at some of the videos, I realized that it is actually very powerful and will invest some time in learning how to use it. Does anyone know of any good written tutorials for Autodesk 123D? Thanks.