Gyro's teeth lose weight!
High-speed drills are used to remove material from teeth. They can be run
dry, or with a stream of water to cool and lubricate the tooth as it is
being drilled. Vacuums are also used to remove water and tooth debris from
the mouth, and with all that going on, you can get a lot of
noise (133K .wav, 12 secs).
Here are before and after shots of the tooth that got the most drilling.
This is the molar that will anchor the back of the bridge. You can see
that a fair amount of the tooth is removed; this allows the bridge itself
to be made of enough material to completely cover the tooth that it is
anchored to. The more of the tooth that is covered, the stronger the
bridge will be.
The dentists have a trick to make a wimpy retainer tooth more effective at
anchoring a bridge or crown. In my case, the bridge was not covering all of
the front tooth, so Dr. Konen cut two small notches into its sides.
With the notches in the tooth, the bridge is securely locked into place and
cannot slip off in any direction except straight up, the way it went on.
Here's an attachment for the handheld drill that's used to remove material
from the tight spaces between two teeth, although this one operates more like
a disc sander than a drill bit. The handheld piece is an air-driven turbine
that can spin at up to... fasten your seat belts... half a million RPM!
Of course, with a bit attached, as soon as they touch tooth, they're gonna
slow down quite a bit. Enamel is removed at speeds around 20,000 to 50,000
RPM, which is plenty fast enough to keep heat from friction at a minimum
and to keep from chiseling big chunks out of the tooth.
All done drilling! Now we're ready to make a mold
of these teeth that the lab will use to make the bridge.
