Since students at CU take the NBDE Part 1 (the first half of the national board examination) the summer after their first year (as opposed to the second year), our curriculum is designed with the majority of our time spent in the classroom and minimal lab work first semester. My only lab class was Dental Morphology, and our only projects were wax-ups.
Waxing is described exactly as it sound: building and carving a tooth out of wax. We're given a tooth peg, palate of different colors/textures of wax, and various instruments to start. To wax, you heat the tip of your instrument over a bunsen burner and dip it into your wax, then drip it onto the peg, repeating the process until the base of your "tooth" is established. Then you carve the wax down using other instruments until you have the correct size and shape. From there, you rotate dripping wax and carving until eventually (several hours later), you have a tooth! CU strongly emphasizes the importance of occlusion (the way teeth come together in the mouth), so we then have to check the occlusion using powder and our articulators, adding and removing wax where needed.
The following are some of the wax-ups I did over the semester:
(Disclaimer: I admit that waxing is not my strong-suit. My work was consistently around average, but improved over the course of the semester.)
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| #8 facial view |
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#8 lingual view
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#26 facial view
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#26 lingual view
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#14 occlusal view
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| #15 occlusal view |
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