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The artificial teeth are built exclusively on prescription only and ordered to the dental laboratory. They are real custom-made medical devices for the patient.
With regard to the artificial denture, the first challenge we have to address is that of its name. Commonly, in clinics, names are not completely exhaustive in order to avoid getting lost in technical definitions and specialized terms: today, however, our intent is to shed some light on this notion and we will try to do it in a comprehensible manner and complete at the same time.
Take, for example, the ordinary ceramic tooth cemented on the natural tooth. The correct definition used in communication between the doctor and the laboratory is “Definitive fixed prostheses”, precisely for the use of ceramic as a coating material. Indeed, if in place of the ceramic the resin is used, the product would have been called the temporary fixed prosthesis.
It is important to make an emphasis on the difference between these types of prostheses and materials due to their different characteristics. If the ceramics are studied and developed to provide long-term resistance and durability, the resins and consequently the provisional products are defined as medium / short-duration ones that can withstand the inside of the oral cavity.
It is important to note that the lower durability of the resin does not mean that this material is of low quality. We are talking about one of the most used materials in the dentistry and the manufacturers have to certify themselves that its staying in situ should not to be defined as final. The provisional acrylic resin should be replaced in short by a permanent prosthetic elements and stays in the patient's mouth only for the time required to manufacture a finished product according to the aesthetic / functional requirements agreed with the laboratory.
To meet these demands, on provisional and definite products, ordered by dentists who work with us, the Dental Team Laboratory has evolved, over years, acquiring the best systems and technologies on the market.
In addition to the barely treated aesthetic coating, our ceramic tooth cemented on a natural tooth, taken as an example, has also an extremely important component that is only mentioned sporadically: the structure. These structures are the elements on which the prosthesis actually is constructed and can be made up of many materials. And the biggest and obviously the most noticeable difference at first glance is in color. The structures can be white structure gray and even, in some cases, structure yellow.
These chromatic differences are obviously due to the various materials that can be used. Let's try to list them here:
Gray Structures:
- Cobalt-Chrome Alloy (in technical jargon referred to as Lega Vile)
- Titanium Alloy (which in comparison is much more easier to handle during the manufacturing process than that in Cobalt Chrome)
- Low Gold Content Alloy.
Yellow Structures:
- High Gold Content Alloy (often referred to as Golden Plating)
- Zirconium
- Lithium Disilicate
- Integral Feldspatic Ceramics
- Composite
- PEEK (Polyether ether ketone)
- Acrylic Resin
But: transforming all these different materials from the raw form into manufactured finished structures ready for use requires specific instruments, protocols of exhaustive and in-depth processes and primarily the experience and the professional skills of the technicians. These requirements and qualities are jealously preserved in the Dental Team.
It is important to consider all these different materials because between the structure and the coating there has to be an almost indissoluble connection in order to guarantee the functionality of the prosthesis. Indeed, to achieve this goal, the specific ceramics and coating materials are used for the material of the structure to which they will bind. Thus, there are ceramics specific for Cobalt Chrome, ceramics for Zirconium, ceramics for all kinds of alloys of gold alloy (though the most used is Gold Alloy of 750 thousandths of a percentage of gold) and so on for all materials in use.
Manufacturing systems for the transformation of raw materials
In the last 10 years our laboratory, following and in many instances anticipating the wave of industrial change in the dental sector, has acquired instruments, technologies and skills in the CAD-CAM. These important but necessary investments
have enormously widened our professional horizons and consequently have provided us with the label of excellence as a leading company in the manufacturing of tailor-made medical devices.
These technologies allow us to process those high quality materials such as Cobalt Chrome, Titanium, Zirconium and Lithium Disilicate together with a long list of other materials whose use is extremely limited or avoided altogether because the quality requirements imposed by our company for physical / mechanical quality and final result on the milled prosthesis are not met.
Up until 10 years ago, the vast majority of dental laboratories used the lost wax casting system to manufacture their products.strong> This system is still used by thousands of dental technicians but does not guarantee the same precision and the same variety of solutions that can be achieved with the CAD-CAM technology. Hence, these laboratories are automatically and completely excluded from the market of milled prostheses binding themselves to manufacturing process based on a technology with big limitations, in some cases in the maintenance of the precision of their products.
Unlike the milling process that allows scooping the material out from the whole piece, keeping its crystalline structure intact, the lost wax system changes the state of the metal and without an automatic flame control to obtain a good mechanical result, the experience and skill of the dental technician are exclusively to be relied on. The fusion with the flame has been replaced by automatic induction melters that the Dental Team is equipped with And such a system of fusion controls the temperature in addition of a pump that removes air inside the melting chamber and injects the alloy during all the procedure automatically. Given the intrinsic difficulty of the technique and the long manufacturing times, the results are always susceptible to possible deformations and impurities.
The prostheses we manufacture require hours of work and micrometric precision. The instruments at our disposal are used in all areas of micro-mechanical industry, assimilating our products to those of a wide range of precision industries, from medical to jewelry to the aeronautics. There is no reason not to invest in the search for new techniques in an area as important as the dental industry and our own products, certified (according to European Directive 93/42 / EEC) and guaranteed, an expression of the highest quality for many dentists, throughout the national territory, of whom we are suppliers, prove it.
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