It's been an interesting week so far.
Tuesday saw me in the
dentist's chair having things done to two teeth.
The most interesting
was having a ceramic crown fitted to tooth 37. The one in front of the
wisdom tooth, lower left).
Procedure involved drilling out the tooth
interior to hit rock bottom (ie living tooth tissue) then gluing onto
that a significant mound of pretty silid stuff that seemed to be
spattered out of some kind of gun. Think firing concrete from a high
pressure hose.
Mould it to shape and let it set.
Insert a tiny
camera on the end of a wand and take multiple pictures of the whole
site, the operational area and top and bottom jaws. You think the
stitching photo panoramas together is smart? This darn thing, (made in
Germany) was doing CAD tomography of my mouth.
Duncan, the dentist,
then built an imaginary crown over the virtual edifice, fine-tuning many
aspects especially the interface with the gum/socket area. He was
working using a finger-wheel and a screen about 18 inches square.
He
could rotate the image any way he wanted, with or without attached jaws.
The finalised information was then sent down the line to a machine in
another room. There, a cube of raw ceramic material was fastened to a
spindle, and the unit fastened into a small covered lathe. Water-cooled,
this milled the inside and outside until what was left was a perfectly
fitting crown for the stump fixed inside my tooth cavity.
This was
then fitted onto another spindle, and placed inside a 800 deg C oven for
20 minutes heat treatment.
The last, tricky bit, was to put some
fancy-pants glue on the stump, and rapidly force the hollow crown in
place. I think he used too much glue which squeezed out, and he them had
to spend about 15 minutes removing the obstinate surplus which had
squeezed out around the rim.
Tough stuff; he said that if he ever had
to remove it, it would be a hell of a difficult job. GULP - - $1530.
I
was expecting more like 1200. Oh well.
A week earlier a couple of
choice Olympus DZ lenses showed up on Trademe. One was a Olympus Zuiko
Digital ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6 Lens [1] which eventually went the day
before for $281. I carefully read the reviews and decided it was a
little below par AND I might not have all that much use for it anyway,
So I let it go.
The other was a DZ 50/2 Olympus macro. I'd been aware
of this lens for maybe 8 years but was never prepared to stump up with
the nearly $1100 retail price here. I prepared my bidding strategy, and
it worked perfectly. 100 minutes after exiting the surgery, I had won it
for $340 NZ.
I hope to be able to use it for not only macro and
portrait, but gathering images for stitching into long landscapes - when
i get HUGIN or something else to work for me.
Then came the tricky bit
as I did some financial juggling to pay for them both. I should have it
tomorrow or Monday. :-)
Together they came to more than half my
monthly income ...
But I have no regrets. Not yet anyway.
Duncan's
estimate for the total plan he has mapped out for me is $9,500. I'm
trying to talk him out of about 1/3 of that.
Cheers, Brian
Links:
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[1]
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=772082307
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