Materials and workflow for milled dentures

[bigj1972]

Smart dental labs can get tooled up for pennies on the dollar just by sticking to those barely-used, improperly-maintained mills gathering dust in dentists' offices. There are used equipment vendors who basically specialize in this exact market. That's how often this particular lateral move backfires on dentists, enough for it to support its own little robust industry of canny manufacturing detritivores. Of course, you may beat the odds and stick with it for long enough to become your own machinist... but everyone who tries this also thinks they'll beat those odds, so, you know, proceed with the utmost caution.

 

[JonnyLathe]

Yeah, this should be the main feedback to listen to here. CNC machining is a 3-year degree program here for a reason, there's a ton that goes into understanding subtractive machining as a mechanical process, never mind how to do it to a high standard of quality / efficiency. Your existing fabrication experience will not prepare you in a meaningful way for machining. Just because every dental-oriented mill acts like it's a one-button process does not make it so.

Smart dental labs can get tooled up for pennies on the dollar just by sticking to those barely-used, improperly-maintained mills gathering dust in dentists' offices. There are used equipment vendors who basically specialize in this exact market. That's how often this particular lateral move backfires on dentists, enough for it to support its own little robust industry of canny manufacturing detritivores. Of course, you may beat the odds and stick with it for long enough to become your own machinist... but everyone who tries this also thinks they'll beat those odds, so, you know, proceed with the utmost caution.

Where can I find these vendors??

 

[tuyere]

The dynamic here reminds me of an aside Anthony Bourdain included in one of his books- the archetypal unsuccessful restauranteur, and I promise the dentist part is coincidental, The Special-Recipe Dentist. I don't mean your exact dynamic here, I mean the general tendency- you're actually pretty humble / receptive to advice, as far as people in your situation usually are here, so I offer this in the spirit of reflection, not of criticism or in mean spirit. I feel it's illustrative of a common (and costly) error in logic made specifically by well-compensated people in a technical field who are highly-skilled at what they do.

So we have this eponymous Dentist. They have some recipe they make well, and at dinner parties people love to tell them, this is great! you should open a restaurant! And the dentist in question, maybe looking for a change of pace or a more retirement-suited occupation, decides their special recipe is good enough to warrant a restaurant after all. And they have the capital to make it happen. And then, almost invariably, the restaurant fails within a year or two at most, unless our Dentist has the wisdom to hire a restaurant industry careerist to run the joint how they like with no micromanagement from above. Then a used equipment dealer, who has likely been watching the restaurant since it opened, recognizing a pattern, swoops in, buys all their shiny stainless barely-used kitchen equipment for a tenth the new price at a liquidation auction, and resells it to more industry-familiar people who've worked every station in a restaurant already, trying to start a business with far less capital at their disposal. The restaurant business, too, has a thriving side-industry of people who do nothing but gut failed restaurants, of which there are always many.

So what's gone wrong here? Late-career skilled professionals, especially when well-compensated, chronically overestimate their baseline competence in other areas that aren't actually covered by what they're definitely pro at. Again, nothing personal, it's a marked trend that's been observed statistically in a couple different fields in different contexts. If I'm a dentist, how hard can cooking be? But that misses the fact that good food isn't actually particularly important to running a successful restaurant, not alongside being able to run a place on razor-thin margins requiring very long hours and frequently a lot of miserable grunt-work on behalf of the owner-operator. And the people selling this pricey shiny restaurant equipment do everything they can to encourage and puff up potential restauranteurs, indulging whatever happens to be motivating their career choice even if it's obviously unworkable, because they don't get paid for successful restaurants, just opening restaurants. And the end result is that most new restaurants fail, especially the ones launched by people who aren't career hospitality industry people. Nobody is telling new restauranteurs to get real or be realistic, they're all telling them they're going to achieve their wildest dreams, and the ones with a lot of capital can afford to do so without necessarily, you know, burning their retirement fund or whatever.


I do wish the example Bourdain used here wasn't literally a dentist specifically, but there is a reason he does so- and the dynamic at play with restaurants carries over pretty directly to something like CNC milling. It's dental, techs can do it no problem, the equipment vendor says it's easy, and I can afford it without having to mortgage my house- no big deal. Right?

 

[CoolHandLuke]

and as you correctly put it, the dumbing down of CAM has offered a glimpse of what life is like in industrial manufacturing, so successful labs or successful dentists (or both) sometimes partner and build their own Implant company only for that to fail spectacularly as neither of them knew the specifics of how implants are made nor regulated.

i've made the mistake of going to a tech developer, and while it got me my name on a patent, i will always say it taught me more about why i shouldn't ever go back to that environment, no matter how smart i think i am, it showed me how little i really know.

 

[tuyere]

Where can I find these vendors??

Assuming you're American, no idea, sorry. We've got a Canadian guy who's looking for a home for our old Stratasys, he specializes in used equipment, so there must be a bigger market with more players down south. Everyone's so protective of their sources with stuff like this, where the access is the valuable thing...

 

[GermanEngineer]

if we were talking general denturism being done on cadcam theres an awful lot to talk about, but as you mentioned Ivotion, this narrows the scope of the discussion significantly because currently only two mills are "certified" for ivotion workflow: the VHF, and the PM7

PM7 are sold by ivoclar, the PM7 Tools are sold by Ivoclar, the Ivotion discs are sold by Ivoclar, the exocad/3shape material definition file is managed exclusively by ivoclar.

i think you can tell where this is going.

ivoclar owns the whole process. every dime.

Ivotion was developed by Ivoclar, initially only for 3Shape and later adapted for exocad.
The CAD workflow is an encrypted format made up of non-combustible files containing many individual surfaces and coordinates. Currently it is the CAM5 format.
The license for 3Shape, for example, is purchased once. There are no annual fees.
MillBox, Hyperdent and WorkNC cannot open this format.

If you need information about machines other than the PM7 and VHF for Ivotion, contact Dental-Softworks in Germany.
The DS-CAM software of the same name can also process the format. The nice thing is that there are no annual fees for the CAM.
If you are familiar with Ivoclar CAM, you will find your way around DS-CAM straight away. The milling results and surfaces are first class.
Many CAM systems that cost many times more cannot compete. We have been using DS-CAM since 2009 and are also familiar with Hyperdent, WorkNC and others.

My first recommendation is always the DS-CAM from Dental-Softworks.

 

[GermanEngineer]

You should definitely check out the
VITA Vionic® Vigo
workflow and material for dentures.
This allows you to create complete dentures very effectively. You can mill or print the bases. The teeth are available as prefabricated teeth with a bonding system, as teeth for self-milling, or as printed teeth.