When dental offices send dental work to us, they trust us to receive nice work. Indeed, we have made a lot of beautiful dental cases, but at the same time, we need to work closely with dentists as a team for great dental cases. Here we use some examples and give 7 pieces of advice:
1. Prepare teeth before sending dental cases to us
Please always prepare teeth before oral scanning or taking impressions (unless you need non-prep veneers or diagnostic wax-up). Please do not ask us to prepare teeth in our lab, because you could have difficult chairside adjustments and have problems with fitting.
Teeth without preparation
2. Remove undercuts
Please try not to leave undercuts after preparing teeth, or at least not big undercuts. In many situations, doctors ask for bridges, but they send cases with very big undercuts. If we just block so many big undercuts, doctors may find the crowns very loose (for easier fitting). And patients could suffer from food trap over time. This could also cause gum infection.
big undercuts dental preps
3. Leave enough space
Please prepare more teeth, so there is about 1.5mm space between teeth. We also need space for the occlusion (1.5mm). If doctors only prepare little teeth, there is no space for making details such as translucency and more color blending on the incisor. With a narrow space, dentists could have a hard time inserting crowns at the chairside.
Teeth preparation without enough space
4. Try to create a nice arch
Please prepare teeth referring to the arch of jaw, so we can align teeth with crowns. Let’s take an example of the tooth in the picture above. The tooth (red arrow) is very bulky. The doctor could prepare more tooth towards the palatal, so we can try to make the tooth less bulky, and align other teeth.
A great tooth preparation should follow the alignment as much as possible
5. Check bite before sending cases
Please take care of the bite. Let’s look at the example below. The occlusal space is way too big. We could not decide the patient’s bite, so we suggest making a temporary bridge first. With temporary bridges, doctors can make adjustments for correct bite. Please note wrong bite could break crowns and bridges easily
Wrong bite relationship
6. Gum lines
If gum lines of the crowns have to be symmetrical (especially for upper front teeth), please let us know before production. Actually, it is best that you make symmetrical gum lines through surgical operations. If we do that only through making crowns, there could be food trap over time.
Unsymmetrical gum lines
7. Need digital scans/ impressions with clear margins
Please send us clear scans with clear margins. Before oral scanning or taking impressions, please clean blood and saliva first. With clear margins, you will find our fitting is perfect!
Dental scan with blur margins