Component Design was carried out by skilled draftsmen working under the guidance of analysis and senior engineers in the drawing office. The draftsman still had to be an extremely competent engineering designer. Some very top staff could both draft, manage and do the analysis – such as Geoffrey Wilde of Rolls-Royce, who began as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce and finished up holding 79 patents and carried working well into the turbojet era, not retiring until 1979.
Design always began with an agreement about the overall direction to follow by the chief designer, and passed down to drafting office managers. Here analysis specialists would carry out extensive calculations by hand to get the design very close to ideal before the prototype was built.
Once the engine was detailed on paper, the actual position of all the components would be laid out, and the speeds and loads on each shaft carefully checked, and the smallest lightest bearings possible chosen.
From there the draftsmen would complete individual manufacturing drawings, and 3D concept views of how the finished part would look, like the Turbocharger below:
A Daimler-Benz Turbocharger from 1943 shown above in the concept sketches and below as the completed part. Lack of Nickel, Cobalt and Chromium made turbochargers and jet engines very difficult to make reliably in the Second World War in Germany. Therefore Germany was forced to pioneer hollow turbine blade cooling and engineering ceramics, BMW in particular pioneering the hollow turbine blade, which fed cooling air through the hollow turbine shaft then centrifugally outwards through each blade.
