dental lab news and technology trends
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Published by Gnathodontics, Ltd.
Fall 2008
© 2008 Gnathodontics, Ltd.
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It’s official, after 30 years in our current laboratory,
construction is moving ahead rapidly with our new
building and we will be moving soon! For those of you
who haven’t heard the rumors, due to very positive
growth, we have outgrown our Wheat Ridge lab and
will be moving into our new building in Lakewood. A
little background info on Gnathodontics is in order.
From humble beginnings in a small office suite
located in Boulder, Co., Guenter Grothe founded
Gnathodontics, Ltd. in 1975. Rapid growth occurred for
Gnathodontics, and a year later the lab was moved to a
location in Wheat Ridge, (a small house down the street
from our current lab). With the continued growth and
success of Gnathodontics, a new location was sought out
and our current 5,200 square feet lab on 44th Avenue in
Wheat Ridge began in 1978. Fast forward to 2008.
After nearly five years of searching for and inspecting
numerous prospective buildings in the Denver Metro
area, a decision was made by Steve Mott, Gerald Pontasch
and Brenda Boone, (Gnathodontics’ owners), to purchase
an 11,000 sq.ft. building centrally located at 10488 West
6th Place, in Lakewood. This is near the frontage road on
the north side of 6th Avenue, at Miller Street, which is
between Kipling and Simms. We closed on the purchase
of the building on February 14th 2008, and construction
began on our new lab the very next day!
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For those of you who have been to our lab recently,
you’ve seen how busy we are and how cramped it is to
have 53 employees, (44 technicians) in our 5,200 sq.
ft. building. The new lab is being finished out with
bench work positions for 60 technicians with additional
potential for about 15 more technicians. The new lab
facility is a two-story building with production areas
on the second floor and administration, inventory and
shipping and receiving on the ground floor. Our custom
(where I assisted), Restorative,
Imaging, Oral Surgery,
Hygiene, Pharmacy, Laboratory,
and Sterilization.
Another room of the complex
was set up as a cafeteria
with food and cold drinks
for all the volunteers. A very
nice touch (no pun intended)
was the area set up with volunteer massage therapists
who worked on many tired and sore dental volunteers!
By 5am when the doors opened a line had already
formed around the outside of the main building as
patients in need waited for the first-come, first served
free dentistry. As large and chaotic as it was the entire
event was very well planned and organized and everyone
worked together as one huge dental team to serve as many
shade room, also on the ground floor, (and away from
the production area) will have a comfortable dental chair
for patients and a large south facing window allowing
natural light in for optimum shade taking conditions.
The shade room will also have a stain and glaze furnace
in it. Next to the shade room will be a waiting room
reserved for shade patients. Additionally, our CAD/CAM
department will be located on the ground floor. My
personal favorite area of the ground floor is the conference/
education room with seating for 16-20 doctors. We will
be hosting numerous continuing education seminars and
lectures with a variety of speakers from across the dental
field. This room is perfect for Study Group meetings as
well. The possibilities seem endless!
All of this excitement about finally making the move
to a modern, roomy, state of the art dental lab building
comes with a great deal of acknowledgement and
appreciation that this would not be possible without the
support of our loyal customers. Many thanks to you all,
and you can look for even better things to come from
Gnathodontics, Ltd. in the coming months. Call me
later this fall for a tour of our new facility, and you’ll
understand what all the hubbub is about! Cheers!
One of the many great services we offer at Gnathodontics
is custom shade taking. Today’s esthetically
demanding dental patients are very in tune with
cosmetic procedures, due in part to recent television
programs such as Extreme Makeover and Dr. 90210.
At Gnathodontics, we provide a customized shading
service to our dental clients to help provide the bestlooking
and functional restorations possible while
satisfying your patients’ cosmetic desires. In this article,
I will detail our shade service and how it insures your
patients are provided with the best possible results for
their final restorations.
We schedule our shade appointments at the laboratory
much like the appointment at the dental
practice is handled; the patients are scheduled by calling
our front office, scheduled and seen as soon as possible.
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Ideally, when taking a shade, I prefer a twoappointment
process. It helps if the patient is prepared
for this before hand so they are not surprised when
they hear they need to make two trips to the laboratory.
The first appointment is to actually pick a color to
build the porcelain, take digital photographs, and
discuss the patient’s expectations for the final result.
This appointment generally takes about 20 minutes.
The second visit is a follow-up shade verification
appointment to check the restoration before the final
glazing procedure and verify that the color is correct. If
possible, I prefer to remove the temporary restoration
and try the actual crown in, this generally eliminates any
problems at the seating appointment in the clinic. This
appointment can take up to an hour. This procedure is
preferred but not a necessity. If a try-in is done it needs
to be ok’d by the dentist and removed by the dental office
before the patient comes for the second appointment,
or doctors can give us a written prescription to do so.
We also encourage proper oral hygiene (brush and floss)
before the shade taking process.
As the demand for these appointments continues to
rise, it is the offices calling the laboratory to schedule
their patients as part of their routine checkout protocol
that seem to work the best. This insures that the patient
gets scheduled at the laboratory right away, and we can
stay on a pre-determined turnaround time of 2-3 weeks
in the laboratory. All too often when this appointment
is left up to the patient it doesn’t get scheduled soon
enough and will cause delays. We will provide your
office with direction cards upon request or they can be
downloaded from our website homepage (www.gnatho.
com). These cards have a map of the area and written
directions to the lab and general information so your
patient will know what to expect when coming to
Gnathodontics. (see image of card below).
There are several other important issues that make
the entire process more efficient. I have found that
taking a shade the day of the dental appointment is not
a good idea, unless it is done before the appointment
at the dental office. The teeth tend to dehydrate after
typical prepping and impression techniques, resulting
in an inaccurate shade evaluation. Always provide the
laboratory with a stumpf shade (underlying prep shade)
for all-ceramic restorations. This can be done with the
empress stumpf guide or a regular shade guide, but the
information is vital. Also, please indicate if the patient has
endodontically treated teeth or a post and core.
Finally, bleaching procedures should be discussed
and completed before the appointment at the
laboratory. Often the patient comes and tells me that
they are planning on doing some bleaching in the
future, this makes it very difficult to get an accurate
color match as it is nearly impossible to guess where
they will end up after the bleaching. If the patient is
currently bleaching they should be finished at least five
days before their first appointment.
These are some helpful guidelines for doctors and
staff to be aware of so that together, we can give each
patient the final restoration(s) they deserve. We look
forward to providing you with some of today’s latest
developments in dentistry and being a part of your
dental team.
Do you guys outsource any of my lab work?” This
seems to be a common question dentists are asking
lab owners and managers these days. Are the materials
you use to make my restorations FDA approved? This
is another question we have been fielding here lately
at Gnathodontics. Fortunately, both of these are easy
questions for us to answer.
As a full service dental lab, Gnathodontics has
always prided our selves in making it all in-house here in
our Wheat Ridge laboratory. In fact, we have often been
an outsourcing provider of partial frameworks to other
labs who don’t have the equipment and/or technical
capabilities to cast their own partials. Now, to answer the
question of whether we outsource any of your lab work
to another lab, or even more importantly, to a lab in
another country. All of our lab work is fabricated here in
Colorado by our skilled technicians with the following
exceptions. One; Our Procera copings, (substructures)
are designed by us and then manufactured by Nobel
Biocare in their New Jersey facility. This protocol is the
same for ALL Procera labs in the United States. Once
milled to our exacting specifications, Nobel Biocare
sends the copings to us for fabrication of the final
restoration(s). Two; our Lava copings (substructures)
are manufactured by a milling lab in the United States,
as we currently don’t have the space for the extremely
large equipment used in the milling and sintering of
Lava zirconia substructures. The “milling lab” returns
the copings to us and we then complete your Lava
crown or bridge per your detailed prescription. Three;
our Atlantis implant abutments and Biomet 3-I Encode
abutments are CAD/CAM manufactured by each
of these companies in their respective United States
facilities. These individual outsourced components of
our final restorations represent a small portion of the
excellent lab work that Gnathodontics provides to our
customers. These outsourced components are all made
in the USA.
Now, onto the issue of the materials that we use in
the fabrication of your lab work. Gnathodontics has
always purchased our materials from top manufacturers
in the dental industry such as Ivoclar Vivadent, Vita/
Vident, Noritake, Nobel Biocare, Bego, Jensen Industries,
Aurident; the list goes on and on. The materials we
purchase from our suppliers and manufacturers are
stringently regulated by the FDA and are subject
to approval from the FDA prior to sale in the USA.
Should you have any questions or concerns regarding
our lab materials, don’t hesitate to contact me here
at Gnathodontics.
Gnathodontics, Ltd., made in the USA!
On Saturday July 19th 2008, Laboratory technicians Yuhua
Du, Claudia Buckley, and Myron Wilson, in addition to
myself, volunteered at the 2nd annual Colorado Mission
Of Mercy Program at The Larimer County Fairgrounds
and Events Complex in Loveland, Co. This three-day
event through the generous efforts of nearly 800 volunteers
provides free dentistry to local people in need.
Our day started off bright and early at 5:30am and
involved bringing all necessary equipment and materials
to set up a makeshift lab for making temporary partials
and repairs. Just finding our ways to the lab area of the
huge bustling complex was an ordeal as the fairgrounds
looked to me like the largest dental clinic in the
world! The entire clinic was housed in a huge building
with multiple rooms set up as a massive waiting room
(which housed nearly 500 people each day), Anesthesia
(where I assisted), Restorative,
Imaging, Oral Surgery,
Hygiene, Pharmacy, Laboratory,
and Sterilization.
Another room of the complex
was set up as a cafeteria
with food and cold drinks
for all the volunteers. A very
nice touch (no pun intended)
was the area set up with volunteer massage therapists
who worked on many tired and sore dental volunteers!
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By 5am when the doors opened a line had already
formed around the outside of the main building as
patients in need waited for the first-come, first served
free dentistry. As large and chaotic as it was the entire
event was very well planned and organized and everyone
worked together as one huge dental team to serve as many
shade room, also on the ground floor, (and away from
the production area) will have a comfortable dental chair
for patients and a large south facing window allowing
natural light in for optimum shade taking conditions.
The shade room will also have a stain and glaze furnace
in it. Next to the shade room will be a waiting room
reserved for shade patients. Additionally, our CAD/CAM
department will be located on the ground floor. My
personal favorite area of the ground floor is the conference/
education room with seating for 16-20 doctors. We will
be hosting numerous continuing education seminars and
lectures with a variety of speakers from across the dental
field. This room is perfect for Study Group meetings as
well. The possibilities seem endless!
All of this excitement about finally making the move
to a modern, roomy, state of the art dental lab building
comes with a great deal of acknowledgement and
appreciation that this would not be possible without the
support of our loyal customers. Many thanks to you all,
and you can look for even better things to come from
Gnathodontics, Ltd. in the coming months. Call me
later this fall for a tour of our new facility, and you’ll
understand what all the hubbub is about! Cheers!
patients as possible. The spirits of all volunteers were riding
high and everyone seemed to wear a smile throughout the
busy and hectic day. Gnathodontics’ technicians Claudia,
Yuhua and Myron barely had time for a break as they
quickly made prosthetics for patients who then were called
over intercom when their appliances were ready. Claudia
received a nice compliment from a dentist who mentioned
how nice the temporary partial she had just made was
finished and how well it fit the patient!
The entire three-day event served a total of nearly
1500 patients, with more than 1 million dollars in
donated dentistry being provided by almost 800
volunteers! By the end of our long day Myron, Yuhua,
Claudia and myself each had decided that we would be
an even bigger part of next years Colorado Mission of
Mercy Program. For more information or to volunteer
for next years event go to www.cdaonline.org.
© 2008 Gnathodontics, Ltd.
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