3D printers produce dental surgical guides and teeth models from intra-oral 3D scan data.
Race Dental is Australia's largest dental laboratory. CEO, Brad Race discusses how his company applies 3D digital technologies to stay competitive.
What does Race Dental do?
Race Dental is a full service digital dental laboratory servicing Australia-wide and into the Asia-Pacific region.
How did your company begin?
Established in 1936, Race Dental is a 4th generation family business established in the heart of Sydney. Now 82 years old, the company has grown significantly with manufacturing centres in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia.
How many staff do you employ?
Race Dental currently employs approximately 150 people.
How many dental cases do you process a year?
Race Dental currently produces well over 100,000 cases a year.
What fraction of your cases involve digital production?
Approximately 75% of all cases involve digital production, from scanning, CAD, through to milling and printing. Race Dental also employs a dedicated R&D team to understand and efficiently implement emerging technologies. The adoption of digital technologies has been critical in sustaining our growth and has allowed Race to successfully scale our operations to continue to produce high quality 100% Australian and New Zealand made dental prosthetics and orthodontic appliances. The investment in technology has allowed us to keep manufacturing on-shore and compete against cheaper labour markets.
How has digital dentistry changed in the past 10 years?
As with any other globalised industry, the dental industry in Australia was hit with the import of cheaper products from Asia in the early 2000s leaving Australian labs in a vulnerable state. Rather than joining the outsourcing movement or scaling back to reduce costs, Race Dental significantly invested into emerging technologies and teams designed at maintaining higher quality Australian made products at a price point competitive with the imported prosthetics.
A milled zirconia crown is fitted to a 3D printed verification model.
What is your digital production setup? What do you produce on each machine and why?
Race Dental operate the largest network of intraoral scanners in the region which give us direct digital impressions for almost half of our cases. Traditional mould of patient’s teeth are also digitised as the first step of production as the majority of products are produced using CAD/CAM.
We run a variety of 5 axis milling machines from small desktop units from vendors such as Roland DG, through to large automated industrial units from DMG Mori with a total of approximately 20 machines in use. Milling remains an important part of our production process as many of the prosthetics are produced in ceramics and metals such as titanium and cobalt chrome. The limitations in terms of material selection or additive technology precision prevent these products being produced using additive technologies.
Race Dental also has made large investments in additive manufacturing for certain products including castable frameworks, models, moulds and biocompatible prosthetics with machines from 3D Systems, EOS and Asiga in daily production. Significant R&D expenditure has left a graveyard of unsuitable equipment, such is the nature of evaluating the various products offered to market and wading through marketing claims.
Describe the journey you went through in evaluating 3D printers for your application.
In short it was a long, expensive and often frustrating journey. With any machine, we start by requesting samples which is a good way to see what the printer is capable of. Samples produced from manufacturer’s designs will show the printer in its absolute best light, so it is best to send your own designs. However, receiving a nice sample back and checking it for accuracy is only the start of the evaluation - you really need to use the printer day in day out in your own facility to see how it fares as a production machine.
For example, we ran some DLP printers in our R&D department from a European manufacturer that appeared to tick all the boxes, but turned out to be quite unreliable and more often than not failed to complete builds for one reason or another. Tearing the machine down we could see that it wasn’t ready to be released as a product - the build quality was quite poor (it was not an inexpensive machine) with a lot of “hacks” - tape and cardboard for example.
Another example was a low-cost laser scanning stereolithography system which performed well initially but quality rapidly degraded with every build rendering them useless after a short period.
The units we use now in production have proven themselves to not only deliver the results, but also long term consistency backed with good manufacturer support.
Milling is used for producing ceramic crown and bridge components.
How do you see the division between processes that are performed with subtractive manufacturing and additive manufacturing? I.e. what processes are most economically suited to subtractive and which are best for additive?
The selection of additive or subtractive manufacturing starts with the material requirements for the specific prosthetic device or product. Many products are either impossible to produce with additive manufacturing or are prohibitively expensive due to immature technology. An example is ceramics where we have not found any additive technology that can compete with milling. For products that can be produced with either additive or subtractive techniques it then comes down to an assessment of economics, reliability of process and the ability to obtain the required precision.
Products particularly suited for additive for example are dental models which can be milled, but are much more economically produced with printers such as the Asiga 3D Max which we use heavily for this purpose. Although not strictly required to produce prosthetics, models are demanded by dental customers who like to visualise the restorative work before the patient fitting consultation.
Frameworks in Cobalt Chrome are produced in house using SLS technology from EOS Technology. The high cost of these machines is off set by the large capacity which can result in favourable economics. It is also possible to produce for example, Chrome Cobalt partial denture frameworks using SLS but the finishing steps required due to the extensive support material required. For this reason instead of SLS we use 3D Systems Multijet machines to produce castable resin frameworks using wax supports. Removal of the wax supports is easy by melting and leaves us with a clean framework ready to cast.
In addition, advanced biocompatible resins are now available which allow us to produce prosthetic devices and surgical guides which can be used intraorally. Again, here we use the Asiga 3D Max range as their completely open system allows us to utilise resins from almost any vendor. Yes, we actually 3D print teeth that go straight into a patient’s mouth!
What is your vision for the dental laboratory of the future and how are you preparing for this?
We see further developments in additive technologies making this the preferred option for more and more of our product range. Increasing printer performance and lowered costs of consumables is already evident and this trajectory is expected to continue. The ultimate aim is for better patient outcomes through application of advanced technologies.
