Wax On Wax Off

After several weeks being stuck in lectures eight hours a day we were all ecstatic to hear that we would be transitioning to spending some time in lab.  We would still spend the majority of our time in class, but would have about a day and a half designated for waxing teeth each week.  What I didn’t envision when I heard this was trying to recreate perfectly shaped teeth with a Bunsen burner, a few metal hooks, and some blue and green crayons.  It was a slow process to begin, but I’m getting the hang of it and each tooth goes a little bit faster than the one before.  Once they figured we had a strong enough grasp on building teeth up they gave us an assignment to carve down to a tooth.  Just before fall break we were each given a block of hard wax about 1” x 1” x 2” and told to find a tooth in there somewhere and it would be due the day we returned.  Oh and last year only 20% of the class passed this assignment.  May the odds be ever in your favor, happy fall break.  My initial thought was I’m pretty sure a CNC machine could knock this out if I had a template tooth, or maybe even a 3D printer.  Alas I could find no template tooth and had to resort to actually carving it down.  Thankfully Kristin had purchased a cool X-Acto knife set for crafts so carving wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.  Still I got wax shavings in my clothes, backpack, phone, and hair.  The more I worked on this stupid thing the more I wanted to stick a wick in it and light it.  I wound up spending a whole day up in the wax lab over break just carving and shaving.  It’s all done, now just to find out if I’m in the 20% who pass (the odds are not in my favor).

Yes the root looks terrible

and no the root wasn't graded

so therefore I spent as little time as possible on it