Surgical Guides for Ceramic Implants

[surgicalguideloser]

Hey guys!

Looking for some help here. I have a dentist who's wanting pilot guides for ceramic implants. No big deal, I made the guide for him and the surgery went smoothly and he wants a pilot guide for almost every implant he places. This is all great and well BUT the titanium pilot sleeve is marking up his ceramic drill. Titanium also defeats the purpose of him using all ceramic equipment and placing ceramic implants. I've called around and done some independent research but I can't find anything on titanium sleeve alternatives for pilot situations. Does any one have any advice or can they point me in the right direction? Open to anything, even crazy ideas. The past week I've been trying to duplicate the sleeves I've got in zirconia by scanning them in, cleaning them up with mesh mixer, and then milling/sintering them but that's been a big miss so far, and also makes me slightly nervous.

 

[tuyere]

To have a fighting chance at making these from zirconia, scanning won't cut it, you lose too much detail and design intent. Crawl all over it with a micrometer and vernier calipers and reconstruct the as-designed nominal dimensions- if you can get a dimensioned drawing of the sleeve, that's ideal- and then re-model it in a NURBS mechanical CAD suite. Export a high-resolution mesh from that and you avoid the photocopier effect that makes everything mushy and imprecise.

That said, I've had poor results attempting to mill geometrically-constrained parts with dental CAM intended for organic, irregular 3d forms- you kinda need conventional CAM to get access to milling strategies that prioritize maintaining flat planes and concentric holes. For something that's axially-concentric and basically a tube, ideally you'd turn it on a lathe (a real lathe, I mean, not a dental lab 'lathe' ), but you won't have access to one of those.

You might luck out and be able to source a suitable ceramic tubing off the shelf from mcmaster-carr, I don't know the exact geometries required here.

 

[ToofMaker]

Upload your scan, also take cross section measurements in the software of the sleeve, Ill just model in fusion360 quick

 

[JonnyLathe]

Why not just do a sleeveless guide?

 

[zero_zero]

Hey guys!

Looking for some help here. I have a dentist who's wanting pilot guides for ceramic implants. No big deal, I made the guide for him and the surgery went smoothly and he wants a pilot guide for almost every implant he places. This is all great and well BUT the titanium pilot sleeve is marking up his ceramic drill. Titanium also defeats the purpose of him using all ceramic equipment and placing ceramic implants. I've called around and done some independent research but I can't find anything on titanium sleeve alternatives for pilot situations. Does any one have any advice or can they point me in the right direction? Open to anything, even crazy ideas. The past week I've been trying to duplicate the sleeves I've got in zirconia by scanning them in, cleaning them up with mesh mixer, and then milling/sintering them but that's been a big miss so far, and also makes me slightly nervous.

Why don't you make the whole thing out of plastic instead?

 

[Affinity]

I agree or PEEK, PEKKTON?

 

[PRO ARTS DL]

How about designing the sleeves on an CAD program and then printing them out of a material like Rodin Titan?

 

[tuyere]

How about designing the sleeves on an CAD program and then printing them out of a material like Rodin Titan?

If you absolutely have to manufacture your own sleeves from scratch, this is probably the least painful way to get acceptable results, yeah. Still probably not a great use of time or money, but I get the satisfaction of having figured something like this out all in-house, soooo