Who actually makes your teeth, and where?

A small team, on purpose

The lab is a handful of people. There's a lab manager, two ceramists with more than twenty-five years each at the bench, an overnight technician and the design team.

Everyone knows every case, and nothing gets handed to a stranger.

We also run fewer machines than visitors expect, and most are the same type. When one acts up, everybody already knows why.

One kind of work

People sometimes ask if we'll make them a crown or a partial denture. We don't.

The machines could. But the lab makes full-arch teeth and nothing else, every day. Nobody has to work out a new kind of case from scratch, and that's where the speed comes from.

The night shift

This is the part nobody sees, and it's what makes your week possible.

While you sleep, your next set of trial teeth prints right in your office, so it's ready when you come back in the morning. Without that, a patient who traveled to see us would lose a day.

Our own lab manager started on that shift, working nights here after teaching school all day. We still hire that way. We look for people who care about the result, and we teach them the rest.

Design stays in-house

We could send the design work out and save a lot of money. We don't, because a design can look perfect on screen and still be hard for the machine to make. If that shows up in the middle of the night, nobody can fix it before your eight o'clock appointment.

Keeping the designers next to the people making your teeth means they're solving the same problem together.

Why your final teeth look better than your trial teeth

Trial teeth print in one flat shade. Your final teeth are milled from a layered zirconia that's clearer at the edge and shades toward the gum line, like your own teeth.

That material is fairly new. Early zirconia strong enough for a full arch came in one solid, lifeless color, and some patients asked to go back to their temporary teeth. The fix back then was to send the zirconia out to be layered with porcelain by hand. That added several thousand dollars per arch, about ten years ago.

Now the shading is built into the material. It looks better, costs a fraction as much, and it's one reason this treatment is more affordable than it used to be.

What the try-ins feel like

There are usually three. The first is a little off, the second is better, and the third is about right and ready to become your final teeth.

If you're traveling in, we can do two fittings in one day, morning and afternoon, so everything fits into one visit. The side that rests on your gums stays the same each time, so the second fitting doesn't hurt. You just get a better set of teeth than the one you had at breakfast.

Now and then we'll ask for an extra hour

Sometimes a case runs late and we move your appointment. That's because people are finishing your teeth by hand. When they say they need more time, the work isn't done yet, and we'd rather move you an hour than give you something nobody's happy with.

Zirconia is very strong when you bite. It's much less forgiving of being dropped or handled roughly before it's finished, so the last steps take real care.

What hasn't changed

Twenty-five years ago all of this was done by hand, from impressions and wax to setting each tooth one at a time.

Most of that is digital now. What hasn't changed is that people with decades of experience still decide how your teeth should look, and still finish them by hand.