Original Grey Technic motor from 1977: 6216a

[Chris Dee]

I would not want to use 6216c01 / 6216c02, because 6216 is the designID for Brick 2 x 4 x 2 with Curved Top. The LDraw parts folder should (ideally) contain only design IDs, and where there is a conflict between DesignID and ElementID, we don't have a good solution. Using 6216a, or 6216m is a hack because elsewhere NNNNA, NNNNb, etc. are varients of the same design. I welcome suggestions to resolve this and apologise to Jens for inadvertantly opening this 'can or worms' with the good work that he has done.

My brother just sent me a bunch of DesignIDs for the motors; there are a lot of different numbers, more than I expected.
The numbers were read from the bottom of the motors - the space is important:
Two prong hole variants:
" 8 20" (arrow motor, the one with bronze oilite bearing)
" 9 26"
" 40 5"
" 0 50" (my own old motor)
" 9 26" (so he has two of these)

...
Three prong hole variants:
"41 8"
"34 9"
"9 26" (this is the DesignID for the body, so he actually has 3 of the motors that use this housing)
"28 8"
"39 8"
"20 7"
"36 9"
"47 4"

-I find those numbers quite short - are they the full DesignID numbers, or would additional numbers have to be added ?

I do know there are more variants than I first mentioned (I saw a few more yesterday; eg. old style axle on a 3-prong hole motor; it's for sale on eBay - I saved the picture on my computer).
Maybe I'll make a small web-site with all those different variants I can find - I know Magnus is also interested in this.
@Magnus - I'm also interested in closed meshes (as you can probably see from the two PNGs I attached earlier).

These are probably not design numbers but mould position/version identifiers. With parts where one injection mould is used to make multiple copies of the part it was common practice with parts of this age for each to have a different numeric identifier. Presumably this helped to identify flaws specific to one position in the mould.