Hello John
When u are talking about a crack in the presintered state, is it a crack that can be seen by eyes or u would need loupes or microscope.
Is there away to recognize the cracks.
Well after 3 days of unrest and investigation, getting feed back from dln and cap, following were the problems discovered:
1) the tech who painted the bridge with zz water stains made the mistake of putting the bridge into oven only after 5 min!
Since the coming of caps multi FZ preshaded pucks, the coloring and drying step of zirconia had been forgotten in our lab and this was probably the reason of mistake.
2) we have been using Ivoclar programat s1 proprietary P8 setting of 7 hrs 20 min, which is for bridge frameworks. The cooling gradient was too steep and cap told us that the 28mm puck needed a 15 hour cycle with a very very slow cooling rate. So now we have programmed the 15 hr sintering cycle.
3) out of 6, only two sprues were 3mm and 4 were 2mm. In the new design now they are all 3mm.
4) the bridge was placed on the sintering plate flat w/o any beads.
The first bridge, we did was successful, so we did not worry much.
Anyway, the new bridge has been milled and I will post the pictures soon.