S&P Spring Aligner & regular lower/video

[labdude]

Watch entire video to see cutting of soft acrylic on Spring aligner.
Comments and advice welcome.

[RetainerDesigner]

Nice to see the master at work. Never though of soft cutting with a spatula before. I use an exact o knife for cleaning up the labial acrylic. I need to get back into soft cutting the spring part, never had luck before, but I know it saves time when finishing. I hate using cutting burs. You waited longer than I expected. thought the acrylic would be to hard by then. I guess it depends on how fast I am with the second pour up.

[labdude]

Thanks Cade,
The more times you do something, the better you get at it. You know this. Use what ever tools work for you, and give the smallest cut. Just make sure it goes all the way through and clean around the lingual loop portion on both sides of it. You can see that at the very end of the video.
Thanks for the interest Cade!
Mike.

[labdude]

After lookng at this thing a few times, it just doesn't look like what I see. Maybe because the camera is located where it is. Acrylic seems to be wetter than I notice when doing the job. Also there seems to be a large pile of powder building up on the bench right under the work. That is an optical situation. It looks like more than it really is.
And the acrylic powder that flies out of the powder container, geeze,
never noticed that before. It is getting drawn right toward the vacuum hole, which is right under the camera.
I like to make the acrylic just slightly thicker than a finished appliance when possible. It takes more time to do, but it saves lots of time grinding down excess acrylic. Which is also where, if you appliance is to thick, you will distort the appliance with heat and the flexing that happens upon grinding.
Secondary is the fact that using less acrylic, saves your over head for acrylic. Not in a huge way, but over a year it sure makes a difference.
Really, time spent grinding acrylic that has not been S&Ped carefully to the correct thickness and distal relation, is a real issue for your income.

[trisha]

Labdude ~ Awesome!!
Thank you sooo much for sharing your tech. I am at the library and am able to finely take a look at the video. I learned a lot. I have always used a cutting burr for my spring retainers, but I am going to try it your way, what I think Cade called soft cutting. What are the instruments that you use for this?? I have some scalers, but nothing as fine as what it appears to be on the video.

Hope everyone voted to day,
trisha

[labdude]

Grinding acrylic, spring aligner...