Last week before I went on holiday I signed off the order for our 3D printer. The explanation of the lab set up for the practice has technologically is a bit ridiculous and the investment has been considerable. For us it was time to jump with 3D printing and we decided to go down the route of ordering the printer from Straumann.
There were two real significant points when getting the 3D printer
1. Ensuring we had the appropriate support from the company we were buying it from, there will be no doubt we will get this from Straumann, having worked with them for nearly 20 years now
2. The functionality of what we wanted to do with the printer itself
We can already mill our surgical guides in the practice, so there was no need to have a machine just to produce surgical guides for implant dentistry, but there is no question that the surgical guide milling clogs up the machine (in terms of time) and probably clogs up the machine in terms of dust. So it will give us the opportunity to print our 200-250 something surgical guides in the practice without effecting the milling machine. It will also allow us to have the opportunity to print for other people if they choose to use us – that might be a good idea, getting surgical guides printed by surgeons.
The printer is sold by the companies on the basis of the fact you can print models, but we don’t see that as being a huge part of our practice, although this will probably develop some what as we get the machine. Certainly for diagnostic cases it might be nice to print models that we have designed only digitally.
The final aspect though for us which is really exciting is the ability to print jaws pre surgery and do this quickly. Our machine will print fast and firstly in complex surgery, but I expect most surgery will be able to convert our dicom CBCT files into STL files and print them. This will give us a full boney model for the surgery case before starting. Something which can only enhance the work that we do, an exciting thing to start in September in the practice.
Blog Post Number - 1297