The Complete Guide to Becoming A Dental Laboratory Technician

Chapter 1: What Does a Dental Laboratory Technician Actually Do?

Picture a room no bigger than a typical family kitchen, lined with workbenches, each one lit by a bright task lamp. There's a faint smell of acrylic and a low hum from a vacuum former in the corner. Someone at one bench is painting tiny layers of pink porcelain onto a metal frame with a fine brush. At another, a technician is peering through magnification loupes at a small white model, carefully carving a shape out of wax with a tool thinner than a toothpick. This is a dental laboratory, and the people at those benches are dental laboratory technicians. The short version of the job is that they make the replacement teeth, crowns, bridges, dentures, and other dental devices that dentists prescribe for patients. But that sentence doesn't begin to cover what it feels like to do this work.

Let's start with the most common task, because that's what you'll actually spend hours doing if you enter this field: fabricating crowns and bridges. Here's how that works in practice. A dentist sees a patient who has a tooth that's too damaged for a simple filling. The dentist grinds the tooth down to a small peg, takes an impression of the area (usually with a tray of gooey silicone material), and sends that impression to a lab. Your job begins when that impression arrives at your workbench.

You first pour a plaster-like material into the impression to create a hard