One slip, and I gave myself four extra hours of lab work. Here’s how.

At the School of Dentistry, we are short on cash. (Our dean is also leaving, but that’s a story for another day). So, the students (us) do a lot of intricate lab work in order to make the stuff our patients need (crowns, bridges, etc.). That way, we don’t have to pay a professional lab to do as much of our lab work. This does the following:

1. Saves the school money.
2. Teaches students (us) what good lab work looks like.

These are good things. However, all of this lab work also:

1. Drives me insane.

We use a polyvinyl siloxane (sure you can use polyether, if you want to really bum your patient out) to take a really accurate three-dimensional negative of a patient’s teeth. We then use a special stone (Type IV die stone) to make a positive version of the patient’s teeth in stone.

We then go through a series of steps to produce something that looks like this:

THEN we send it to lab. They take the time to create an entire fake tooth in wax, cast it, possibly porcelain veneer it, and polish.

They are supremely good at this. Incidentally, they’re supremely good at the steps before (the pouring of the cast, the model work to produce that picture above). BUT, us students, who will never do lab work on this scale again, have to try our hand at this stuff. Pretty discouraging, when you make the mistake I did.

If you want the crown to work in the patient’s mouth without adjustments, the whole process has to be completed to tolerances of about 10-100 microns. That’s where my problems started.

I was doing a final trim on a piece not unlike the blue one you see above. There’s a border on it, called the margin, that represents the division between the edge of the crown and the rest of the tooth. I’ve never messed this part up before, but this time I nicked it when trimming. My slip obliterated a piece of margin 0.7mm wide and about 0.2mm deep. I only showed it to a few people, but the consensus was universal: a hole like that is about the size of the grand canyon when you’re doing die work. When hundreds of microns matter, a half millimeter error might as well be a mile.

And so I redid it all.

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Tonight’s perfect weather let us take a bike ride to and from the Out On A Limb performance. During it, I discovered something quite interesting. See, I’m usually biking during the day when the wind is up and my forward progress depends on fighting against it. For this bike ride, however, it was dusk. For safety, we clipped a taillight to Mykala’s… tail. Coasting through the evening, the only thing impeding my progress was the occasional bug running into my face.

Leaning back in the saddle, dropping my hands to my sides, I could ignore the mild hum of the two wheels vibrating through the carbon and aluminum beneath me and just imagine I was jogging. Effortlessly. At 20mph. With a headlight. The streetlights dropped away just as quickly as they rose up next to me.

The illusion was convincing.

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My wife baked some AWESOME brownies, so we thought we’d try our hand at some food photography.

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Before leaving for GV Black Tie, the dental school formal. We tried the alcohol-caffeine bomb Four Loko that night — I do NOT recommend it.

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We walked to the local café and watched the snow fall and the cars get stuck in it.

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