# Designing a Maxillary Bite Guard
## Introduction
[3] Okay, guys. Let's go ahead and design a bite guard. I like to do maxillary bite guards personally. [9] So I'm gonna go to default. Let's call this occlusal guard. And I'm gonna go ahead and click any tooth on the maxillary arch, go to bite splint, three d print like usual. [22] And about 2.5 or one millimeter on the periphery and 2.5 on the occlusal. Anywhere between two and two and a half is great. So I'm gonna go ahead and click okay. And let's just do an upper.
## Designing the Bite Guard
[38] Hit save and go to design. So we're gonna load our scans that we made using the mod jig at a open vertical. They're gonna come flying in right at that position so we don't have to change anything on the virtual articulator. [53] I'm gonna show you guys just a really fast occlusal guard design. We're not gonna go into dynamic articulations on this particular video. We will have some that that go into that though if you wanna check it out. [63] Here, I'm loading the OBJ file. Okay. Now so this is really cool. Exocad wants us to position these models.
[75] I like to go ahead and look at the maxillary arch from the occlusal view, but also look at the incisors, and I wanna split the difference buccal lingually. I wanna see little buccal, little lingual at the same time, and I wanna hit next. [88] And then it's gonna wanna do this AI automatic cloud calculation. I'm just gonna go ahead and hit cancel and hit skip. [97] And I'm gonna go ahead and edit my settings for my virtual wax up bottom. So the reason why I skipped the cloud calculation is because it's gonna automatically segment out the teeth like it did in the retainer video if you watch that.
[112] And it's gonna automatically put the margin, near the CEJ. I like to put my margin at different spots for my occlusal appliance. So I just gonna rather than drag all the auto populated balls, I'm just gonna do it myself. [124] So for bike guards that are three d printed, if you're using one of the flex or soft materials, these default settings are perfect. You shouldn't have to touch anything. [132] If you're using one of the more rigid materials, you could decrease the allowable undercuts to 0.08. This way it's not so tight and hurtful.
## Setting the Path of Insertion
[141] But I'm just gonna go ahead and hit set from view, pick my path of insertion, right down the arch like that and hit next. [148] What Exocad is gonna do is gonna duplicate this model and create something called the virtual wax up bottom. This is a totally new model that has deep undercuts filled in with wax. It has the embrasure smoothed out. [160] Has some of the occlusal anatomy smoothed out so that the appliance just fits and it fits comfortably because a patient isn't gonna wear an appliance that's not comfortable.
[169] And the ultimate name in the game is zero adjustments on the day of delivery. Patient's super comfortable. It slides right in. It's retentive enough, but not hurting them. [179] So we're gonna go ahead now and mark our borders. On the lingual, I like to come down right to CEJ, and I click each tooth once. [194] So you don't have to click a bunch of of the tissue or anywhere in between. If you just want to click each tooth once, that's fine. And for an occlusal appliance, I like to come just right back on the tissue here.
## Finalizing the Design
[209] Okay. So you could see I'm right about mid cervical on my posterior. And then right about the cuspid area, I swing up to be right about the middle of the tooth, right perfectly. [221] If I look incisal gingival here, I'm right about the midpoint of the tooth, not in the incisal third, not in the cervical third. And then I drop back down to midpoint cervical, right about like that. [235] And that's all there is to it. I go back to my original dot, double click, right like that. And it's gonna go ahead and render the appliance, for me.
[246] It's gonna set the thickness in the posterior and the anterior to about two and a half millimeters and then the labial is gonna be at one millimeter. [256] So that's what we get right there. And I'm gonna go ahead now and hit next. Now these surface properties, there are some tools that you could use here to for example, if you're like, if you want to see your occlusion, you could hit your show distances right here. [273] Actually that doesn't come on right here, but you could go ahead and change your thickness right now. Like you're like, oh, I want three millimeters. And when you hit apply, it'll rerender the thickness uniformly.
## Printing the Bite Guard
[287] So so you have options to tweak the thickness right here if you feel like you messed up your settings. The other thing is if you're designing like a coist deprogrammer or something like that, you wanna hit this include pallet so that it renders the part that goes over the tissue of the pallet. [303] They also have this, posterior flattening area that sometimes works, some sometimes doesn't, where you click distal of the cuspids and you hit flatten. [315] And what it does is it basically smooths out a little bit the posterior segment.
[324] So now what I like to do when I get to this tab is I like to go ahead and first get my contacts where I have an adequate pattern and distribution of contacts spread throughout the arch. I'm using my add tool and I typically have it on maximum strength. [342] So I'm gonna go ahead and add some contacts here in the anterior just a little bit. Oftentimes you have to add a little bit in the anterior. Don't worry so much about the strength right now. [353] Just like that. And then I'm gonna go to my smooth, flatten, hold my shift button down and just flatten.
[359] Be careful when you get up here because you could wipe away your contacts really fast. I'm holding my shift and I'm flattening my prosthesis. [369] And what I'm doing is I'm minimizing the size of these contacts. You can see as I'm flattening, that shift button is being held down just like that. [383] Okay. Now that it's like super flat, I'm just gonna go ahead and smooth a little bit up here. I'm gonna go ahead and hit adapt, static occlusion, and it's gonna cut the occlusion into the appliance at a perfect strength.
## Final Adjustments and Delivery
[398] And depending on your occlusal philosophy, you might want to, decrease any type of indentations in the appliance. I don't mind having small indentations as long as I have freedom to slide and are not locking the patient in. [405] And then of course, you could throw this in the articulator, build up cuspid guidance and go through dynamic lateral intrusion and protrusion. But I'm trying to show kind of just a fast bike guard here instead of going to that. [419] We do have plenty of tutorials and courses on how to do that if you wanna go down that rabbit hole. So I'm just gonna go ahead and hit next.
[434] And notice it's sticking through the teeth here kinda weird, And it doesn't look like it's quite adapted. That's because in this next step is when it actually cuts the surface to fit. See? Now we have an appliance that we could use. [449] That is our bite guard in a nutshell. And I'm just gonna go ahead and hit, next. I'm done. [455] And let me go ahead and get this into the slicer so we could get it in the printer so I could show you how I deliver these.
## Printing Process
[466] There are some kind of cool tips and tricks that you could link your Exocad to your Rayware cloud account. I'll show a separate video on how to do that. You guys could search the AI for that. But we're gonna go ahead and do that right now and hit the SprintRay cloud. [483] And I'm gonna hit proceed to printing and it's gonna load it up to my cloud account that's linked. So I'm gonna hit okay. As long as you see these little green things spinning, it's loading it up and you're good to go.
[496] It automatically pop up pops open Rayware, goes right to my account. I click Rayware right here and I'm gonna go ahead and hit new print job. [509] And we're gonna select night guard. And I'm gonna do it on my Pro two. Let me see. Nightguard standard build plate, Nightguard Flex. [524] And I'm gonna go to cloud drive and I'm gonna select the latest thing that's been loaded up.
## Final Steps
[531] Here it is. Boom. Add to print job and then prepare print right down there. It's gonna pop that right in, rotate it, size ledge down 60 degrees from the build plate angulation and it's gonna add a a decent amount of supports. [546] Let's see how it how it does. It's pretty fast these days. I love it. I love it. The only thing I'm gonna do here, because I'm paranoid about print failures, is turn off my sweet sweet autopilot there. Go to supports, add remove individual supports, and just for safety here, guys, to make sure that I don't get a failed print because I don't have time for that, I'm gonna add some more supports here in the anterior.
[573] This is would be the point one of the points of failure is delamination from the build plate or, ripping of the supports here as the peel forces kinda increase as we get back to the posterior. [585] We're all set there. So I'm gonna hit confirm changes, and the back looks great. And I'm gonna hope send it to the printer. We're gonna be off to the races here. [594] That's looking really good. Send to printer. I'll go ahead and get that started, and then we'll show you how we finish it real quick. We have multiple videos on finishing bike cards, and then we'll get to the patient for delivery.
[605] Okay. Let's see here. There it is. Send a queue. Perfect. Can't wait to show you guys how we finish and deliver this.
