Marc Thomas Following Mike's lead in his Zirconia esthetics thread https://www.cerecdoctors.com/discussion-boards/view/id/51026, I have been playing around with the material a bit. This is the first ZR crown I fabricated and cemented with the system. In reality, the one i cemented was only polished, no enhancements at all. It went in between a bunch of very opaque PFM crowns, so it worked out.
I have found Mikes polishing technique in the linked thread to be excellent. I prefer a slighly less aggressive bur for removing the sprue as the white rubber wheel tends to make a few divots as you are removing the sprue. I am liking the green twist polisher as it seems to give me a bit more control. Credit for this goes to my assistant Patrick. For this first test, I did not do much polishing.
What I milled out was an old tzi block in f2, and three cerec zirconia blocks in a2. I milled the first block so you can see where a lot of lab guys are starting out, and where you can too if you want. F2 vs A2
I have found that polishing after sinter is nice, but a medium polish seems to look a little better than a high shine, more of a satiny enamel look than glass. My best results have been medium to fine, then back to medium. All with the meissenger twist polishers, all quickly, being aware of the contacts.
I am trying out some infiltration liquids called "Chang's liquids". They are meant for both translucent and high translucent ZR, and have a wide range of base colors and characterization colors. I went a bit crazy on the darkest crown adding color all around and on the occlusal as well as grey, translucent, groove stain(called orange pink),and blue. This was an A3 color and I am ordering the A2 and A1 for future.
On this crown I applied A3 only on the distal half of the facial, but applied characterizing stains equaly to the crown so that it was easier to assess the change.
Compared to where I went overboard with stain. You can also see the difference between medium then high then back to medium on left and medium then high polish on right
I also saw a question about internal application of stain. I do not think colored stains are going to show through very well, but tere are opaquers for blocking out dark stumps. I applied some on one of these crowns, and then simulated a block stump with a sharpie. I think it blocked very well as compared to the area where i just applied color on the outside.
Here are all three shot through a polareyes filter so you can better see the characterization that is achievable with infiltration liquids
This is all a work in progress. Sorry, no intraoral shots as I just wanted to see what could be achieved with the liquids. I will be posting some other attempts, including intraoral shots to really assess effects of infiltration. Using some grey to knock the value down seems to be the biggest bang for the buck, along with enhacing the grooves
