My Office

Well I took my camera to school and snapped a few shots. I am really impressed with the facilities at Midwestern University. The sim lab is located in a new building with lots of room for growth. I think the second floor is dedicated to dentistry. It is usually only dental students I ever see up there. Here is what the sim clinic looks like. We spend about 4 hours a week up here working on small projects from sealing teeth to waxing up tooth preparations.

You may be asking yourself, "what are those things tucked under the desk?" Well here is what is stuffed under all of our desks.

These are our maniquins made by the wonderful people at Kavo. This is what $15k will get you now a days. We can pull him out and extend him out and throw in some fake teeth and drill away.

Well, our latest project is waxing. We are waxing up the mesial half, lingual and labial, of the secondary maxillary right central incisor, tooth #8. This tooth is a prepared ivorine tooth (plastic tooth). It is basically a project to learn tooth anatomy. It is useful to learn such things like the crown length is about 10.9mm, root is 13.4mm, cervical width is 6.6mm, width at crest of curvature is 7.4mm and so on. There is alot of dimensions to know, I have only scratched the surface. The tooth started out with half of it shaved off, about 1mm. I used a few different colors of wax as instructed to represent different anatomical landmarks such as incisal ridge, marginal ridge, cingulum, and mesial contact point. I will say that waxing teeth has been great practice on developing our manual dexterity and appreciation for lab technicians. I'll throw up a picture of what I'm talking about.

Now for all of you looking at this saying, "wow that looks crappy", don't worry, I'm not done yet. It is very hard to get the surface super smooth with hollenback carvers alone so I will clean it up a little more next time and polish it with a nylon stocking to get it looking sharp! You have to admit I nailed that mesio lingual ridge and lingual fossa (it looks a little over contoured on the photo)! My friends at Ahwatukee Dental Lab would be proud!