New Crown

Decay got under my old crown and ate its way to the nerve. Time for a root canal. Yeh. At least my tooth had good timing. After the Lewis and Clark trip and before the Mexico trip.

First the root canal.  DDS Patel was excellent. 

He managed to save enough of the tooth for a new crown.

The new technology for crowns is amazing. My last crowns required taking impressions of my teeth and then waiting weeks for the new crowns to be created. This technology was developed in Germany 30 years ago and adopted by US dentists 10 years ago.

Jasmine slides a camera over my teeth. It takes 8 pictures a second.

The computer stitches all these images together to make a digital representation of my teeth. I am so happy there is enough tooth left to attach the new crown to.

The computer even figures out where pressure is occurring when I bite. Red indicates the greatest pressure. 

DDS Hoyt designing the new crown.

The computer then creates the new crown. It used photos of the other jaw to determine the shape of the crown's bite surface, so the upper and lower teeth would mesh properly.

Next the computer shows the degree of contact between the crown and neighboring teeth

These spots are then reduced on the computer model

The computer shows how the crown will be carved out of the block of material placed in the milling machine below.

11 minutes to crave out the crown

The new crown now goes into an oven for 20 minutes where it will harden and be dyed to match my other teeth.

A little fine tuning.

In it goes.

Looks great. It is the second full tooth from the left.

The entire process took 2 hours.  

From root canal to finished crown 6 days.