# Printing Occlusal Guards: Tips and Techniques
## Introduction
[0] Occlusal guards are my favorite thing to print, especially because I love the way that the materials are thermoplastic. My favorite materials are KeySplint Soft and I love my Guard Flex materials. You could heat them up just a little bit before delivery, and they just comfort fit in place. It's a beautiful material, and they hold up really well if you design them correctly.
[23] And you need obviously, you need about two millimeters of thickness at the minimum on the occlusal surfaces. And these have been a practice builder for me. I print a lot of bite guards. And there's some tips and tricks on how you could print these, and not all printers are created equal.
## Universal Tips for Printing
[39] So almost everything that I've said in all the other tutorials universally apply to almost all printers. Here I'm gonna tell you there's gonna be some things with night guard that I'm gonna teach you that only work on certain printers. I'm gonna teach you first how to universally nest these that will work on any printer, minimize finishing and distortions on the occlusal surface, but only work with hyper accurate printers.
[60] And so let's get into it. I'm gonna go ahead and go to my computer and find a night guard file. Let's see. I know I got one in here. Guard. Okay. So let's go ahead and call it, bike guard. Are you bike not retainer, not surgical guide, but night guard and arch kit. I always print mine on the night, arch kit. Let's pick night guard flex and hit prepare.
## Preparing the Print
[93] Raymore does a beautiful job at rotating this thing down and making a really good pattern of supports. There's a few little things I almost always do just to increase the success and make sure I have no failures whatsoever. It's important to call it in Ray Wear what it is. So night guard, if you called it something else, you're gonna get a totally different, really janky support structure.
[116] Okay. This is really good. Now there's one thing that I like to do personally is always increase the density of supports on the anterior to minimize potential for support breakaway as it's printing, which would cause catastrophic failure. Typically, you would either look at the build plate and there just be supports printed and no actual bike guard or there'd be nothing printed and it would just be like, a few little support knobs and then they would have a chunk in your resin tank.
## Adjusting Supports
[143] So, I'm gonna turn off autopilot mode. I'm gonna go to support. I'm gonna go to add remove individual supports. And the only thing that I always do is I add a few to the most distal extensions like that, and I always increase density of supports in the anterior. And as a general rule, I just want to have the maximum amount of supports with no balls touching. They're, like, almost touching.
[169] You see that? Just like that. And on the cuspid region, because of the point of the cuspid, the software likes to only have one support point on a cuspid. So I like to come in and actually add more because this is a high stress area in the print. And that is all I do.
## Nesting Techniques
[184] If you wanted to get a little bit more kind of particular about your nesting in this particular case, you could actually try to go to your supports and remove them from wear facets that you see in your design. However, I find that it's a little bit difficult to see sometimes those wear facets, especially in a properly designed guard. Like, there's one there.
[226] You see the little wear facets right there? I purposefully designed that into the guard sometimes so that I could look and make sure that there's no support points in any of the occlusal contact spots. But, as a general rule, it's quite not necessary because you're gonna give that a little quick polish anyway.
## Printing Considerations
[244] And and this is, again, gonna work on every single printer. I love this angle. It's gonna print in about thirty seven minutes here, and we're gonna be good to go. Now, you're gonna say, well, I spent a lot of time getting my occlusal surface perfect. Why would I want supports on my occlusal surface? And that's a good question.
[262] These do peel off like Velcro and and there are instruments that you could just really polish the little bumps back without distorting your occlusal contact areas. It's something that we teach at mod, but there's also some ways that we could creatively nest this that we don't have any supports on the occlusal. So let's talk about that.
## Advanced Techniques
[282] It only works on hyper accurate printers with an x y resolution typically below 45 microns with it works better on three eighty five printers than four zero five printers because four zero five printers over burn and over penetrate clear resins more than a three eighty five because the shorter wavelength of light penetrates less, longer wavelengths penetrate deeper and tend to over burn things like cylinders and and size ellagas when you when you do this technique.
[307] So let's rotate and go almost perfectly not quite perfectly vertical, but just if this is perfectly vertical, it's gonna be about five degrees or so, maybe maybe maximum 10 tilted. Very, very subtle. And we're gonna switch our support style to, max strength, and let's see what we get. This is gonna freak you out.
## Final Adjustments
[342] That's almost perfect. But let's go ahead and add just a few more. So I'm gonna go to supports, add remove individual supports. Check this out, guys. So what I like to do is add three along these borders here as far back as the red goes. I usually don't go all the way back up, but I do go high up. And then on these huge areas, the rule is the bigger the support, the the less density you need.
[368] The smaller the support tip, the more density you need. And so when you have max density or I'm sorry. Max strength, they're gonna be massive support. So you don't need a ton. So it just it's just a bigger spaces between the supports. So what this does is number one, this is not gonna fail. This is gonna be a beast to print. You're gonna clip those supports off and polish them back, but all of the occlusal anatomy is completely free from any type of supports.
## Conclusion
[400] This will have a % success rate of printing. If you wanted it easier to finish, if you went just a higher risk for failure but easier to finish, you could actually go to a balanced, which is gonna give you more density with a slightly smaller tip, but this would be risky to fail. All of this giant cantilever off of those little supports will peel away in your printer. So the bigger supports are better, but if you were gonna do balanced support tips, more density.
[429] So, as a general rule, the smaller the support tips, the more density you need. So now watch, I'm gonna add a bunch. And so when they're in the balance, my rule is I don't want the balls touching, but I want about equal space between all of them. So this would be actually super, super good. And I do like to go up at least to my second premolar area.
[456] This is gonna be great. This will have actually no finishing time. You just basically peel off those buckles like Velcro and hit it for thirty seconds with like a felt pad or a polishing wheel. Okay. That is gonna be awesome. So that's one way to print easy to finish. Again, certain printers that are 405 nanometers, DLP, in particular, will over burn the incisal edges there.
[477] So you you want like a pro two with three eighty five, maybe even a a an Asega type printer or something like that, or, certain LCDs could handle it as well. Okay. So there's also another way to print bike arts, which is this way. And you're gonna use, supports max strength, bigger support points with a cluster of supports.
[509] Okay. So this this is not quite good. So let me just rotate. Let me show you what it did. I overhang this cervical margin here too much. If I look, it's perfectly vertical or even sloping down from the build plate. So what I have to do is rotate just a little bit in the opposite direction about 10 degrees. Like that.
[536] So now, this is great. So now what we need to do is support, add, remove individual. You wanna put a ton right back here. This is gonna be your initial stick. It's the thing that is holding this whole thing in place, and then we're just gonna put a few right there at the flattest part of the anterior lingual. That thing is gonna be awesome.
[557] Now this has the disadvantage of having some supports on the anterior, area. I don't print like this personally. I usually print the other way that I showed you, which is the incisal edges down at a slight lingual 10 degree, 10 to 20 degree like that. That's my favorite way to print, because I have almost no finishing. But those three ways typically work perfectly, with the first way working on every printer.
[585] So I hope this helps you guys minimize finishing time on your three d prints and increase the success rate.
