Say you’re on the road to excellence in dentistry. You’ve taken the necessary courses to upgrade your skills, but you need the tools to get there.
If you’re repertoire includes the best in crown and bridge, then you cannot, repeat, CANNOT, be without the Ministar or its equivalent, the more expensive Biostar unit.
The traditional means of forming plastic templates, or other types of template material, such as orthodontic retainers, ortho appliances, or mouthguards, has been a vacuum forming machine.
However, there has always been a problem with the vacuum machines; the larger the template or appliance, the more inaccurate they become. The vacuum simply is not strong enough to closely adapt plastic to model without deformities.
This is where the Ministar shines. By using positive air pressure to force plastic into position, it allows a perfectly even flow of air to equally compress all parts of the softened plastic material.
It’s hard to get a flawed appliance—the engineering is German and is superb. The Ministar is supplied by Great Lakes Prosthodontics. It is hooked up to a compressed air supply, similar to a high speed handpiece hookup. This supplies the force for molding. A plastic piece is softened by an electrically heated ring, which is suspended over the model. The dental model is suspended in a flask of dense ball bearing-type balls that can absorb excess heat.
The soft plastic is then placed over the model and the air compression is turned on. Using a series of lights to indicate time and temperature, it takes about a minute to soften and mold the plastic. The plastic is then removed, cut to shape, and the edges are smoothed by the operator.
Dentists will be thrilled by the accuracy and uniformity of the finished product. Temporary crowns, bridges, and onlays will come out sharp and distortion-free. The same goes for any other appliance than can be made by thermal softening and molding. Great Lakes supplies a large variety of plastic materials to make a number of appliances. The techniques are all the same, just the time and temperatures for forming the materials vary.
The Ministar runs several times the cost of a simple vacuum forming device, but is less than the Biostar machine, which does the same with more bells and whistles. It will take a little time to learn the technique.
Some have tried the Ellman Press form to get a poor man’s compressed temporary plastic matrix. This technique still doesn’t compare to the Ministar. If you want high accuracy each and every time, Ministar is the instrument of choice.
