Sameer Puri A few weeks ago, I had the honor of going down to UCLA to work with Dr. Ed McLaren. For those of you that don't know Ed, he is a prosthodontist as well as a master ceramist. One of the few in the world that holds that distinction.
We had an Omnicam for the day that through the help of Patterson we were going to do some cases with his residents. Dr. McLaren runs the esthetic residency at UCLA where under his guidance, he trains both clinicians and ceramists. This case we did below was full coverage crowns on two molars. There were some implants that were going to be restored as well on the premolars. Well, after scanning the case with the Omnicam and designing the restorations, we milled out several shades of emax. Now the final photos are still pending because it was a teaching day, I had to leave early and did not participate in the final cementation but one little nugget that I picked up that day was when they do their emax firing, they do it in several steps instead of a single firing. The first step is to crystalize and the second step is to paint the stains and the final step is to glaze the restorations. The glaze this way completely covers the stains and you get a better esthetic result. Now he and I agreed that for most CEREC users, doing 2 or 3 step firing was not practical but in those rare cases where you are doing the case in two visits or if it is a teaching case, then by all means, use multiple firing cycles to get the best results for your cases. We milled out 4 different shades and opacities so be on the lookout soon for an article and some videos on this.
