Our In-House Dental Lab

Your Teeth Are Made Here, Not Shipped Out

Most dental offices send your crown, your veneers, or your night guard to an outside lab and wait two or three weeks for it to come back. We built our own lab instead. It sits on the same floor as the treatment rooms at 314 Coles Street, and it is where your restorations are designed, printed, milled, and finished.

Take a look inside.

Most Cases Are Designed Here, By Dr. Nick

The design work happens here too. Dr. Nick designs most veneer and crown cases himself, which is unusual. At a lot of practices the dentist takes the scan and a technician somewhere else decides what your teeth will look like.

He is the one who saw your face, heard what you wanted, and knows how you smile. So on most cases he is the one who draws it. For certain complex cases we do work with specialist technicians we have used for years, because the right hands for the job matter more than where the job happens. If your case is one of those, we will tell you.

Everything Is Designed in Exocad

Every case that moves through this lab is designed in Exocad. Your scan comes in and the crown, the veneer set, the implant bridge, or the surgical guide is built on screen in 3D before a single piece of material is used. We can rotate it, check how it meets the teeth on either side, test how it sits against your bite when you chew, and change it as many times as it takes, all while it still costs nothing but time.

For cosmetic cases we use its Smile Creator module, which turns photographs of your face into a 3D object and matches your scanned teeth against it. That is the difference between a smile designed around your face and a set of teeth designed on their own.

Why Exocad and not something else? It is open architecture, so it is not locked to a single manufacturer’s scanner, printer, or mill, which means we can send a design to whichever machine on our bench is right for that job instead of whichever one the software is willing to talk to. It has also been the working standard in professional dental laboratories for more than fifteen years, so it is stable, and the specialist technicians we call in on complex cases are already fluent in exactly the same files we are.

Scanning Instead of Impression Goop

Nobody misses the trays. We scan your teeth with a small wand and a 3D model appears on the screen in a couple of minutes. It is more accurate than the old material, and nothing has to set in your mouth.

We run four scanners, because different cases call for different strengths.

Intraoral scanner

Shining Elite

This is our flagship scanner and the one we reach for on full-arch and implant cases. It uses intraoral photogrammetry, which captures the exact position of multiple implants in one pass rather than relying on a physical impression that can flex. It also handles patients with no remaining teeth, which is traditionally one of the hardest things to scan accurately.

For you: Implant bridges that seat properly the first time, and no impression tray for full-arch work.

Facial scanner

Shining Elite Facial Scanner

This one scans your face, not just your teeth. It captures your lip line, your midline, and how your face is proportioned, then we design the new smile against that 3D model. Most smile design is done on teeth alone, sitting on a screen with no face around them.

For you: Your veneers get designed to suit your face, not just to look good in isolation.

Intraoral scanner

3Shape TRIOS

TRIOS is the long-standing workhorse of digital dentistry and it scans in full color. That color data lets us read shade information straight off the scan, and lets you see your own teeth on screen the way they actually look. It is fast enough that most single-tooth scans take a couple of minutes.

For you: You get to see what we see, in color, on a screen, before we plan anything.

Intraoral scanner

MEDIT i900

The i900 is the newest scanner in the lab and the smallest, with a wide scanning window and a very fast capture rate. Where it really earns its place is margin detail, the fine line where a crown meets your tooth. That line is what determines whether a crown seals cleanly or traps bacteria at the edge.

For you: A smaller wand that is easier to tolerate, and crown edges that fit tightly.

Our Three 3D Printers

Three SprintRay printers are the reason so much of what we do finishes the same day. Each one has a job.

3D printer

SprintRay Pro S

The Pro S is the main production printer and it runs most of the day. It handles the larger and longer jobs: surgical guides, working models, night guards, retainers, and full sets of trial veneers. Because it is here rather than at a lab across the country, a job that finishes overnight is ready for you the next morning.

For you: The bigger appliances get made on our schedule, not a shipping company’s.

3D printer

SprintRay Pro 2

The Pro 2 runs alongside the Pro S so we are never waiting on a single machine. Having two means we can print a surgical guide and a set of temporaries at the same time, or keep producing while one printer is loaded with a different resin. It also means a printer going down does not become your problem.

For you: Two printers running means your case does not sit in a queue behind someone else’s.

3D printer

SprintRay Midas

Midas is different from a normal 3D printer. It uses a sealed single-use resin capsule and a press mechanism, which lets it print with a heavily ceramic-filled material that is far too thick to run through a standard printer. SprintRay rates it at three crowns, six inlays, or nine veneers in under ten minutes. It is the machine behind our 3D printed veneers.

For you: A crown, inlay, or set of veneers made from ceramic-filled material while you wait.

Between them we print:

• Ceramic-infused crowns
• Inlays and onlays
• Same-day veneer temporaries
• Same-day temporaries for implants
• Full-arch implant provisionals
• 3D printed veneers
• Night guards for grinding and clenching
• Retainers
• Surgical guides for implant placement
• Temporary crowns and bridges
• Trial smiles and mockups
• Denture try-ins
• Custom whitening trays
• Working models and dies

The trial smile is worth calling out. For cosmetic work, we can print your proposed smile and let you see it in your own mouth first. You get to say yes, or ask for something different, before a single tooth is touched.

The Zirkonite 5-Axis Mill

Printing does not cover everything. When a case calls for zirconia, it has to be carved out of a solid block, and that is what the mill is for.

Zirconia goes into crowns, bridges, and implant work where strength matters most. E.max is the one we reach for on front teeth and veneers, because it catches light more like natural enamel does. Titanium handles implant components. Wax and acrylic cover try-ins and the stages in between, so you can see and feel a case before it is made in its final material.

A better margin is a better seal, and a better seal is a crown that lasts. Once a piece comes off the mill it moves a few feet down the counter to be sintered, stained, glazed, and finished by hand.

The Part No Machine Does

Real teeth are not one flat color. They have warmth near the gum, translucency at the biting edge, and small imperfections that make them read as yours rather than as dental work. Machines get you the shape. The character is still brushed on by hand, one layer at a time, then fired and polished.

Our In-House Ceramist

Most dental offices do not have a ceramist. We have one, working here, a few steps from the treatment rooms.

A ceramist is the person who makes a restoration read as a tooth instead of as dental work. The machines handle the shape and the fit. Everything after that is human: the warmth near the gum line, the translucency at the biting edge, the faint surface texture and the small irregularities that real enamel has. It gets layered on by hand, fired, adjusted, and fired again. The work is closer to painting than to manufacturing.

Having ours in the building is the part that matters for you. They can come chairside and look at your face and your natural teeth in real daylight, instead of matching a shade from a photograph and a shade tab mailed across the country. If a veneer is half a shade off, they see it here and they fix it here, usually the same day.

The Rest of the Bench

Beyond the printers, the mill, and the scanners, the lab runs a sintering furnace to bring milled zirconia to full strength, curing units to finish printed work, a porcelain oven for staining and glazing, and a full hand-finishing bench.

Chairside, we back it up with CBCT 3D imaging and Pearl AI diagnostics, so what gets designed in the lab is built on a complete picture of your mouth rather than a guess.