Feature and Benefit Considerations when Furnishing Your Laboratory with New Furnaces

When given the opportunity to equip a laboratory to its most ideal state, I have found that the planning process must take many aspects of day-to-day operations into consideration. These include the products, technologies and equipment that will ultimately enhance the ergonomics of the working environment and improve our overall productivity and performance.

In the past few months’ columns, I’ve written about the implications and benefits of some of these, including floor-plan design, ventilation, bench height, and the like. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m personally experiencing the thrill and excitement of being able to furnish my new facility from the ground up. This has involved carefully selecting each piece of equipment - including furnaces - that will be used in the future.

With a wide variety to choose from, with many offering seemingly competing features, it may sometimes be hard to decide which furnace to select. Here, I share some of the experiences I’ve had and what features I looked for when selecting the furnaces that I ultimately purchased for my new laboratory (Programat P500, Ivoclar Vivadent, Amherst, NY). Overall, keeping these things in mind will enable you to invest in furnaces that will deliver a solid return in terms of efficiency, reliability, and performance.

Calibration is Key

One of the most important factors to ensuring that furnaces run efficiently and problem-free is correct calibration. With most furnaces, technicians must place a silver bar into the oven and wait until the silver melts into a little ball in order to calibrate it. However, there is no clearly identifiable point at which you know the silver has melted. So, I always find myself fiddling back and forth with it, and this type of process just isn’t accurate when you consider the percentage of error that occurs.

With the furnace I use now, the calibration process is simplified. The furnace includes a device that essentially automates the process so that you know when it’s properly calibrated. As a result, you’re ensured highly accurate temperature calibration for both low fusing and conventional temperature ranges, without the guesswork and human-error potential.

Ease of Error-Proof Programming

When I looked into the different ovens available, I wanted something that would increase our efficiency and help reduce even the remotest likelihood of error. The ovens that we have presently are completely programmable. This is a great benefit.

The downside to programmability, however, is that most laboratory technicians do not use the same program. For example, your program #50 may be for a glaze bake, while mine may be something completely different. If you wanted to use my oven, and forget that they are programmed differently, you could end up with melted crowns.

Although we pride ourselves on accuracy, mistakes do happen. Per year, our laboratory probably makes an estimated $15,000 worth of wrong or incorrectly baked restorations. Typically this happens because we are in a hurry.

So imagine this scenario. You have to do a case for a doctor for whom all he needs is a color change, but you mess up in terms of your firing parameters, so now you have to call the doctor. You must explain the error and tell him that it will take longer than expected to finish the restoration because it may need to be redone again.

This is the type of thing that needs to be kept in mind when you’re trying to identify products and technologies that will make things easier, or more “no brainer,” for you and your lab. Our new ovens not only increase our efficiency, but also reduce our potential for error as well. The operating field saves us time because it is clearly arranged and has a foil keypad touch screen. The graphic display is large, so we can clearly see the product name the furnace is set for, and this lowers our risk of operating errors. And I don’t need to tell you: fewer human errors equate to greater fabrication accuracy and better efficiency.

Easy Design Does It

A problem that I’ve seen in my laboratory, and I’m sure others have noticed it also, is that depending upon the design of an oven, the platform on which the restorations are placed might not stay still. In most furnaces, your restoration sits on a platform that actually rises hydraulically into the furnace.

This can be problematic because not only is there a chance that the restoration may be improperly balanced, but it may also be too close to the edge. Therefore, the chances are pretty good that the restoration won’t remain on the furnace platform. Falling restorations could very well break or, worse yet, the extremely hot restoration might burn your expensive tables.

Because of the complications that reside with hydraulic furnaces, I have always preferred a clamshell design. The more convenient clam shell design not only keeps the restoration on a stable surface without movement but, in the units I have, it also features a fast opening head system that makes our work more efficient.

Muffle the Madness

Typically all furnace muffles have a heating element that can become contaminated, let’s say, when a laboratory uses alloys that contain silver. That means that the oven has to be continually purged so that other restorations - such as those made with porcelain - don’t turn green. As you can imagine, the maintenance is time-consuming.

But what I have found with my new furnaces is that they feature a quarts tube kanthal (QTK) heating muffle technology that resists contamination. What’s more, this QTK technology provides more homogeneous heat radiation in the chamber to produce precise and optimal firing results. That type of reliable, cost-effective operation helps to ensure the accuracy of our restorations.

Conclusion
When selecting a furnace for your laboratory, first make sure that you don’t settle for the cheapest furnace out there. You may be getting a price break, but what will you be spending in the long run on remakes and inaccurate restorations, or technician time? The better the oven you invest in, the easier it is to operate and, therefore, the less chance you’ll have for sapping your productivity and profitability. As I’ve described here, investigate such features as automated calibration, programmable and easy-to-read touch screens, and the heating muffle technology that make higher-end furnaces well worth their investment price.

Do you have a question for Nelson Rego, CDT? E-mail jdt@nadl.org.

 

Want to offer your clients the convenience of credit and debit card acceptance? NADL can help.

Click here to discover the benefits of membership.