Dentures

Well we just finished up our full denture course at school. Now we have moved on to partial dentures. I thought I would put up a few pics of making a denture. We didn't take it all the way to processing, so the rims of the denture base are still blue. But you can get the idea.

The bases are a blue acrylic called Triad. You fit that to the models with out the teeth to make the base. The Triad cures up hard when exposed to light, so once you form them you "bake" them in a light oven for about 10 minutes. Then we added the pink wax to the rims, and place the denture teeth into the wax. We do this on the articualtor to simulate the patients actual bite. Once everything is lined up and ready to go, we would have invested these into stone, and then heated them up to melt out the wax. This leaves a void in the shape of the wax and blue base, but the teeth stay stuck in the stone (plaster). Once all the wax is melted out, we would add into the void a heat mold-able acrylic that is pink. This pink acrylic locks in around the teeth stuck in the stone, and fill back in to a prefect replica what was in wax. Then you break it out of the stone, trim and refine any problem spots ad you have a denture to deliver to the patient.

So that is what we have been up to the last few months of school, making dentures.