[craigboez]

I had not previously heard of GrabCAD but their website looks pretty interesting. Have you used them before? Do they have a student version or do you use a paid plan?

As for naming conventions, they can very quite a bit. A lot of teams use a combination of their team #, the year, a sub-assy reference, and a part #. We would add initials of the creator so everyone knew who "owned" the part. Sometimes they just get named with a description. A good way to see what other teams do is to download their CAD files and have a look at all the part numbers that make up the assembly.