Yesterday, October 1st, DGSHAPE announced that their newest dry mill, the DWX-53D is now available. As you can see from the photo above, this is a beautiful piece of equipment.
DGSHAPE has been in the milling space of the dental industry for decades now. However, in the early 2020s the company made the entrance into in-office milling space, bringing their decades of milling experience into dental offices.
We installed a DWX-42W wet mill into our office in April of 2022 and have seen tremendous results. I'm writing about that part of my experience just so you know that I have experience with DGSHAPE and have been incredibly impressed with the hardware as well as the company.
Now the company has released a new dry mill that general dentists can purchase. The DGSHAPE DWX-53D is a *dry* mill that mills 'pucks'. For those of you not familiar with the term, dental mills use one of 2 different shapes in the milling process. The first is the traditional 'block' which is used to create a single restoration. The second type is the 'puck'. They are circular in shape and derive their name because the tend to look like a hockey puck. They are normally 98mm in diameter with different thicknesses depending on the need.
The advantage of pucks is that they can be used to create longer span dental prostheses such as long span bridges. However they can also be milled into multiple single units prostheses as well. The image below shows the VOCO Grandio Disc.
Using a mill that handles pucks allows for all kinds of advanced applications like All-On-X, traditional and implant supported dentures and other removable and fixed prosthetics.
The advantage of the new DWX-53D is that now dental offices can create these longer span projects in-office. This allows the doctor greater control over the anatomy, fit, contour, and occlusion of their projects. There is also the obvious advantage of speed. Longer span prosthetics can be created in much less time than sending the case to a traditional dental lab. Cost is also a factor as custom milled restorations save the office significantly on lab fees.
One of the things I like about DGSHAPE is the fact that their system is 'open architecture' which simply means that you can use any intraoral scanner and any dental design software. This means that DGSHAPE mills don't require the user to purchase any specific pieces of software. I'm a big fan of having choices and 'open architecture' means that the doctor can use the systems they prefer and still have a seamless integration with the mill.
To find out more, you can go to the DWX-53D webpage.