Conservation and Longevity

During this 3-day 27-hour course, participants will learn how to prepare teeth for conservative gold restorations including inlays, onlays, partial coverage crowns, and pin-retained restorations. Long considered the finest material for restorative dentistry, gold is often (unfortunately) omitted from treatment plans as a viable option in today’s modern dental practice. This three-day course will focus on techniques to produce predictable precision gold castings that conserve and protect tooth structure. The entire process from diagnosis to delivery will be practiced in the extensive hands-on sessions leading to two delivered gold restorations. Special attention will be placed on preparation designs to maintain esthetics, simplify clinical and laboratory procedures, and allow practitioners to provide restorations of the highest quality. Each participant will prepare several ideal cavity designs on the typodont and two natural teeth for actual castings. During the second day, we will learn the laboratory procedures required to fabricate world-class castings and the technique from start to finish. On Sunday, participants will seat, finish, and polish the castings made during the lab session on the second day, and take their work home after the course. In addition to the castings, each participant will learn the fundamentals of direct filling gold (gold foil) and place class I gold foils into natural teeth. Both the digital and analogue workflows will be practiced generating the best gold restorations possible.

[It is recommended that participants take Course I before this course]

Topics Covered:

– Overview of Cast Gold
– Indications
– Esthetic considerations
– The Basic Technique: The Class II Inlay
– Diagnosis
– Preparation design
– Conservation of tooth structure
– Block-out technique
– Impressions
– Temporization
– The Tucker Cast Gold Lab Technique (for the Lab Day participants)
– Cementation, finishing, and polishing
– Variations on the Basic Techniques
– Techniques to increase retention and resistance
– Invisible Onlays
– 7/8 Crowns
– Direct Filling Gold
– Getting Paid for Excellence
– Overview of Clinical Procedures
– The Tucker Cast Gold Lab Technique
– Creating a profitable workflow with near-zero remakes with cast gold
– Digital workflow
– Milled gold restorations.

Learning Objectives:

– Better diagnose the most predictable and conservative cast restoration for any given situation
– Conserve tooth structure through the use of a “block-out” technique
– Create long-lasting restorations, which are esthetically designed
– Cement, finish, and polish gold restorations with natural contours and flush margins
– Fabricate cast gold restorations in the laboratory and be able to train your lab to do the same
– Learn to prepare and manipulate direct filling gold for class I cavities.

Course Outline – Hands-on Sessions

DAY 1

– Class II inlay and onlay preparations and variations
– Invisible onlay preparation (or another prep variation)
– Take final impressions of your preparations and pour impressions in stone.

DAY 2 (Lab Day)

– Impress, fabricate casts, make dies
– Wax-up and invest
– Burn-out and cast inlays
– Divest and finish castings.

DAY 3

– Adjust and seat castings on natural teeth
– Finish and Polish castings
– Gold foil workshop.

Gold Restorations – Cast & Foil. Course V