Sorry, my email was set to sort by name instead of date and I didn't see you'd posted.
Thumbs up on Sketchup. It would have been my next suggestion, but the .obj export is kind of 'sketchy' [yuck yuck] for my purposes. I do like that you can snap protractors onto a face to read angles in Sketchup, though.
If you can formulate questions that don't give away too much of your design, you might post in Hybrids or General Efficiency Discussion. There are a lot of very knowledgeable people here. Why not let them show off a little bit?
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But I am unsure if these actually exist in the real world yet...
But I found a site that I still have to look at a little better that will sell the parts I am looking for out of plastic...So far there is only one website that sells these parts from a 30 minute search.
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You will probably spend as much time on research as on prototyping, so unless your [scale? nonfunctional?] model can be built in 1/2 hour, you could look into types of plastic, tooling, efficiency and friction, etc., in more depth; questions that you might pose in the other forums.
For your hardware, CAD designers like graphic tablets better than mice [I don't]. And a laptop your dad was willing to let go of probably will be brought to it's knees. If it's a Windows machine some distribution of Linux will be faster on the same hardware. And there's tricks like this:
Cool Tools – Optical Drive to SSD Upgrade
For a price similar to the $150 he spent, it's like a new computer. The solid state drive replaces the optical drive, you have the original hard drive you can dual-boot to, no need to do the clean install or rather you're installing into a clean device, and the latency when it has to go to the drive is *way* down. USB memory sticks replace the optical drive.