Wire Bending 101

I got a question on the YouTube channel asking how we make those bends and such. I thought I would make a short video of the basics of wire-bending. Hence, "Wire-bending 101". Enjoy, and ask more questions!

WireBending 101

Tie Dye Retainer Design

I had a dental lab technition from Iran email and ask me how I made my Tie Dye retainers. I wrote down some instructions on how we do that design here in our lab with a promise that I had some video of the procedure somewhere on my hard drive. Well here you go Farid! Hope this help explain my written instructions better.

Here are the writtten instructions for the design process:

1. Choose 3-4 acrylic colored powders.
2. Start on one half of the model
3. take one of the colored powders and make a 4-5 mm wide line along the lingual of the teeth
4. do not wet with the monomer yet!
5. take the next colored powder and make another 4-5mm line next to the last color
6. keep going until you have a half rainbow on the palate of the mouth.
7. take the monomer and carefully wet the powder just enough so the the colors do not run together
8. take a thick piece of Ortho wire and drag it throughout the wet acrylic from the palate to the teeth, so that it drags one color into the other.
9. I usually drag 2-3 times in one spot to really pull one color into the other
10. about 5 drag lines per side of the mouth looks good
11. then cover the new, wet design with clear powder to soak up the excess monomer.
12. do the other side
13. Cure, finish and polish like usual.

Practice, Practice, Practice!!!!

Tye Dye Retainer Design

Mandibular Hawley W/ 4-4 Labial Bow

I have a doctor that this is his standard MD retainer.

His preferences are:

Labial bow from distal of the first bicuspid to distal of first bicuspid on both MX/MD retainers.

Labial acrylic 3-3 on both MX/MD retainers. 

Finger clasps mesial to the 6's on the MX retainer.

Acrylic trimmed to distal of the 6's on MX/MD retainer

Short wire anchor tags on MD ( so that the retainer is more flexible than if you ran the wire along the length of the acrylic)

This video is of the wire bending of the MD retainer. Bending wire distal of the 4's makes crossing the occlusion to the lingual side a little tricky! You can tell it took me a few tries to get it like i like (plus i edited out a few more minutes that you didn't see ;). But the doctor likes it that way so that he can have wire touching the 3's, therefore, more control of them. Also adding acrylic the the labial bow 3-3- really helps maintain tooth position and increases retention.

4-4 Labial Bow Hawley

Habit Appliance (with Spikes)!

Here is the next podcast covering the habit appliance.

I usually split my habit appliances into thumb-sucking and tongue-thrusting. But in this is kind of a combo appliance the "arches" in the palette are designed to break the thumb sucking habit by preventing the vacuum that is caused by the thumb coming in contact with the roof of the mouth. The doctor in this case decided to add "spikes" to the distal of the arches thereby detouring tongue thrusting. Again like I say in the podcast this is usually a last ditch effort to break this bad habit, so this appliance is not made to be comfortable.

Sorry this took so look we were super swamped in the lab for about 2 months! We are usually busy during the what I like to call "the back to school rush" but never this busy before! This is good, it keeps me out of trouble, but i didn't have any time to edit this video. I still have tons of footage to comb through, but editing it together in a coherent way takes more time than I thought!

Habit Appliance (with Spikes)!

Ortho Wire Podcast - Ep 5 Spring Retainer (Part 3)

Here is the third and final part the the Spring Retainer series. I never realized how much footage I took during the whole process. I had to edit out some of the more repetative steps just for times sake. Next time I think I will split up the acrylic videos into 2 parts: 1. Pouring (or shooting) Acrylic, 2. Trimming acrylic. I think that way I can go into more detail. 

Leave any feedback below or you can email it to RetainerDesigner@gmail.com

Ortho Wire Podcast - Ep 5 Spring Retainer (Part 3)