Glad it went well, Brian. In these parts, the first procedure is called a
Root Canal. I've had two so far and, despite my initial fears, found them
to be benign procedures with the exception of a bit of jaw hyperextension
when he jammed that glue gun of gutta percha down the hole he had made in
my cracked molar tooth. Your description of creating a crown from a virtual
image was very interesting and I had never heard of the procedure done that
way. Mine was done years ago simply from an impression of the original
tooth that was sent off to another lab for fabrication of the crown. On the
advice of my dentist, I opted for a gold crown. He has never seen one fail
in 25 years of practice; the ceramics look more natural but they can break
when used as molars, so no more cracking nuts with those back teeth.
Charlie
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 7:17 AM, <bj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> 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:
> ------
> [1]
> http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=772082307
> --
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>
>
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