Adjusting Interproximal Contacts: Floss, Mylar, and a Better Way
Share
Every restorative dentist has done it. You seat the crown, run the floss, feel the snag, reach for the bur, take a little off, run the floss again. Three tries later you have a contact that is fine and a patient who has been in the chair for an extra fifteen minutes. There is a better way to do this.
The precision problem
Interproximal contact is small. On a posterior crown the contact area is typically less than a square millimeter at the tightest point. Reduce broadly and you open the contact. Reduce in the wrong location and you leave the high spot intact.
The limits of floss and mylar
Floss is a binary tool. When it snaps, you know there is a tight spot somewhere along the proximal surface but not exactly where. You reach for the bur and make your best guess. Mylar articulating paper marks across the entire interproximal zone. The band of color covers the high spot and a generous halo of also touching but not tight. You over-reduce or under-reduce and re-mark.
The graphite-marking method
The WriteFit Contact Marker is built around a different idea. You draw graphite onto the proximal contact surface directly with a precision bin-angled instrument. When you reseat the restoration, the graphite transfers from one surface to the opposing surface only at the point of actual contact. You see exactly which sub-millimeter of the proximal surface is the high spot. You reduce only that spot. One adjustment instead of three.
This is the same principle as a machinist using a bluing dye to find a high spot on a precision-fit part. The dental version has been patented (US Patent 9,504,545 B2) and refined through years of clinical use by Dr. R. Lewis McLeod.
The workflow
- Seat the restoration as you normally would.
- Use the bin-angled tip to draw graphite onto the proximal contact area.
- Reseat. Read the transferred graphite. Reduce the high spot precisely.
Average added time per case: under thirty seconds. Average chair time saved per case for the dentist who would otherwise have done three or four floss-and-bur cycles: five to ten minutes.
Try it
If you want to test this in your own practice, we send licensed U.S. dentists a free Contact Marker sample. Use it on the next case where you would reach for floss, and tell us what you think.