Patent ID: 7795563

Claim:
A method of designing and manufacturing a mating pair of electrodes for 3-D welding for welding components together to form and to manufacture a final welded product, said method comprising: determining a total pre-weld thickness of components to be welded; determining a target welded package thickness, the target welded package thickness being a thickness of the components when they are welded to form a final welded product; modeling a 3-D surface of the perimeter of the final welded product as a spline in a 3-D computer aided design program; using the spline to generate a lower die face spline and an upper die face spline; and manufacturing a pair of physical 3 D electrodes from each of said upper and lower die face splines, respectively; the pair of physical 3-D electrodes having an upper electrode based on the upper die face spline and a lower electrode based on the lower die face spline; using the physical 3-D electrodes to manufacture the final welded product front the components to be welded; wherein using the spline to generate a lower die face spline and an upper die face spline includes: dividing the spline into a first, lower set of multiple, small spline segments; and generating a second, upper set of multiple, small spline segments from the first set, with each segment in the second set offset perpendicular to its corresponding segment in the first set, the second set being offset from the first set in a clamping direction, the clamping direction corresponding to the direction in which a tool containing the physical 3-D electrodes is opened.