Hi Voices of the Bench community. This is John Isherwood with the PR team here at Ivoclar. As we wind down the year, all of us at Ivoclar want to thank you for your partnership, your trust, and your continued support. We wish you and your family a very happy, healthy, and safe holiday season. I'd also like to take a moment to thank Elvis and Barb for continuing to make this podcast so special, bringing our community together to share ideas, learn from one another, and grow as a profession. From all of us at Ivoclar, have a wonderful holiday season. And as Santa likes to say, May your days be merry, your nights be bright, and may all your smiles sparkle like freshly fallen snow. Ho, ho, ho.
Welcome to Voices from the Bench, a dental laboratory podcast. Send us an e-mail at info at voicesfromthebench.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Greetings and welcome to episode 405 of Voices from the Bench. My name is Elvis.
My name's Barbara.
What's up? What's happened in last episode of 2020? F***ing 5.
Oh my God. Congratulations. I think we're going on 8 years then, right?
Yeah, I come April-ish usually is when we hit our year mark. So.
Fantastic. So how was your Christmas? What's going on?
Christmas was pretty good. Saw extended family, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, chilled. It was pretty nice. Went for a nice long run and had a day to relax. It was. It was actually nice. Yeah. Decent weather and no obligations. It was quite nice.
Well, we're going into the new year and it's going to be 32 Thursday morning, New Year's Day.
Nice.
I know you chuckle, but for me, that's exciting. That's what it should have been on Christmas, but on Christmas it was like 78.
Oh, jeez.
On New Year's, it's going to be 32. So yeah, we're excited.
Yeah, we were around 50 degrees on Christmas, so almost 60.
There's your voices from the bench episode of weather.
Brought to you, Bot. But hey, just want to say thanks to everyone through 2025 that sponsored us, listened to us, all of our guests. We just had a great year and look forward to 2026. We're not slowing down.
Right on. Shout out to Joe. Thank you for the club and for being positive and all the support. Yeah, I echo that.
So before we start talking about this week's episode, we need to remind everyone that We are not perfect. I know, it's hard to believe. But we had this amazing conversation you're about to hear. But during it, we somehow lost all of Barb's audio.
Can you believe that?
I don't even know how. I know. I don't know. I'm going to blame somebody other than us. But yeah, luckily, we were able to get everyone else's audio. So All the guests you're about to hear, we didn't have to re-record with them, but during the editing process, when I really don't do a lot, just mostly cosmetic, we did our best to re-record all of your questions and comments, right?
Yeah, so if I sound like I'm coming out of a black tunnel, that's why.
Yes.
But we did good. We did good. We tried our best.
Yeah, it's not the same as having the original audio. We're not going to go back in there and put in all the, ha ha ha, oh yeah, I agree, kind of thing. That would take forever. But the content is there. And the most important thing is the guest. We did get their audio. So pre-apologizing for this. Yeah, great conversation. Barb, you were there. I promise everyone you were there. But it does sound a little weird, but we did our best.
All right, well, let's do it.
On to the episode. So this week, we meet a couple of Canadians, and one from Australia, that have found a way to mill partials to completion, which I'm really into this, to do a digital reline on an old denture.
Awesome.
Sound a little crazy?
A little bit.
It did to us too. But what George Calburn has done with Lab Pilot might just change the way you think of doing digital removal. You see, George is an engineer that turned denturist and wanted a better way to do metal-based partial. Working with another denturist, Robert McClay, they set off to do just that. Robert understands removables, but he needed some help with the digital aspect of it. And he found and brought over from Australia Kaylee Gilbert to take everything to the next level.
Yeah, she's a bright young lady.
Yeah, so we talk all about how it works, how it improves fit, and how you might never do a traditional reline again. And believe it or not, that this way is better and better. and even faster.
There's people doing backflips right now.
I think it's awesome. So join us as we chat with George Coburn, Robert McClay, and Kaylee Gilbert. So Barb, CAM has been a big topic for us in the past few weeks, and now that we're such experts on this matter, I actually recently learned about an exciting new partnership.
Oh yeah? What's that, Mr. CAM expert.
Well, you don't have to be a d*ck about it, but... Everybody knows our good friends at Ivoclar.
Yes, of course we do.
Yep, good people and they probably also know about their Ivotion dental solution.
Do you mean the one where the discs are already split into two colors so that you can design and mill a complete denture all in one shot?
Yeah, it's crazy how that works. Don't know how it works, but you're right. That is it. There's no bonding of the teeth to the denture base.
Well, I bet that makes everybody life easier, including mine. What a goopy mess that that can be.
You betcha. So until now, you can only mill Ivotion dentures on a closed system. However, Ivoclar has been working with Follow Me Technologies to implement the workflow into Hyperdent Cam.
Wow.
That means you'll be seeing it on a lot more open machines.
All right, so give it up. That's amazing. But do tell. Do you know which ones?
Well, I know for starters, we're going to see it on the Roland DWX 53 series mills, which a lot of people have.
Yep.
And the Imagine I mills.
So that is crazy awesome. These Hyperdent dudes are everywhere, right?
I mean, not just everywhere, but everywhere. They're like PMMA chips stuck to my--.
Oh, we got it. Hard stop. Nobody wants the mental picture you're about to paint for us.
Voices from the bench. The interview. I was going to say, I heard nobody else, but we're going anyways. So this is super exciting. A friend reached out to me and said, Elvis, how come you haven't had perfect on the podcast? And my first question was, what the hell is perfect? And they said, why don't you have them on and find out? And she connected to me with George. I got last names. Hold on. I was, I had it up and then George took forever and I lost it. George Calburn.
Calburn, silent W. You'd never guess.
Calburn. How are you, George?
I'm very well. Yourselves.
So we're doing great.
Doing fantastic. And where do you, where are you coming from?
I'm calling from Kelowna, British Columbia. So it's on the west side of Canada, which is a couple hours out of Vancouver.
You know what? I swear to God, Vancouver was one of the most amazing places that I've ever visited. We went on a cruise to Alaska and we left from Vancouver and it's just an amazing, amazing area.
You know what? Once you move here, you never move back. You just stay here. So yeah, this is one of the better places to be in Canada and we're grateful.
Do you stay because you're trapped or do you stay?
It's the warmest place in Canada, so that's where we all like to go eventually.
I hear sarcasm there. And also joining you from Perfit is Kaylee Gilbert.
So I'm not with George's company, but I...
Oh my Lord, this is so confusing. Okay, so no, you're fine. We're going to figure this all out. We have a whole hour. So Kaylee, what do you do?
Yes, so I'm a digital tech for Rob. I'm doing all the digital designs and... And we work directly with George.
So you really do every design? That's amazing. Exactly.
The brains of the operation.
And then Robert McCleary.
McClay. The R is silent.
McClay. Oh.
McClay.
Yeah, there's no R whatsoever.
I'm A denturist.
Oh, nice.
For those of you unfamiliar with what a denturist is, it's a typical practice, right? We are half technician, half clinician, if you will. And Kaylee is my primary technician and the source of all things digital that are good.
As a wonder tech.
Let's start with George. Tell us where you come from, how you got into this crazy world of teeth, and what exactly Perfit is.
Yeah, I mean, it's a crazy world that we live in, so it should be a company with an equally crazy story. And so I think that I can tick those boxes. Yeah, right now we are actually rebranding. And so we are leaving the perfect moniker behind and we are now evolving into Lab Pilot. And so we kind of go through a little bit of the past and the reason that we've made that pivot, but I was listening to one of your last guests, the greatlabs.io guys, and it's funny how many of our stories overlap because we all start doing something and then realizing, Oh, part of that was a good idea, but part of that really wasn't. And so we end up being- That's how we learn. That's exactly it. That's the only way we seem to learn. I don't know if you're like me, but that's how I learned. I started, I wasn't even in dental. I was in engineering and I really had the delusion of being an inventor. I didn't know what I wanted to invent though, right? So I thought engineering school was probably the closest thing that they had to inventor school. So I enrolled there and after I finished the first year, I kind of realized that it maybe wasn't the inventor school that I thought it was. And so I decided to take open studies and that meant picking whatever courses you want and really having no direction. So I was taking quantum mechanics, philosophy and taking sociology and psychology and basically about to have deep thoughts about being unemployed. You're so marketable. Right, exactly right. And so, you know. What are you good at? A little bit of everything. And absolutely nothing too, yeah. At the time I was like preparing musical instruments. So all brass instruments, I was a cabinet maker. So I had 101 jobs. And then out of pure luck and coincidence, my mother was a career counselor that were showing new jobs to all these new Canadians that were immigrating from- Wait.
A minute, wait a minute. Your mother was a career counselor? That's correct. She let you do open studies?
Well, you know, it was kind of hard to direct me. I was, you know, I was going my own way. I was going to be hard to direct me. Lost cause? Is that what you're saying? A little bit, but I was on my own journey. Yeah, exactly. But it was a really, amazing because she came to me and she's like, I met this guy. He makes dentures. He's a wonderful man. You should meet him. And my jaw dropped. I couldn't be less interested. I'm going to tell you the truth right now. I'm like, oh God, false teeth? No, And to her credit and to what changed my life was she kept nagging me and kept asking me to do it. And I made her a deal that if I went and met this person, that she wouldn't bring it up ever again. And so I went and I met him and I saw lost wax capture, the same way the Greeks and the Romans would make statues thousands of years ago was still the way that we were doing things. And coming from engineering, I knew that in dental, like Sarek had been around since like '86, '87, we'd had it in the crown and bridge space for decades, but none of that technology ever trickled down into removables. And so naive me thought, hey, this is going to be quick and easy. You know, I'll be able to introduce them to a computer and a printer and a scanner and well, away we go. And so that was 2003. So that's when I enrolled into...
So that was really early. You guys were early adapters.
Yeah, that's when I had the vision of Digital Ventures. And that's actually what brought me to the Dentures program in Alberta at NAIT. And so what I realized is that I needed to understand the foundational... you know, information before I could even go into the digital space. So I went through the traditional schooling, was opening up traditional analog clinics. We had five clinics at our height and we...
Wait a minute, you went through the whole denturist program and got licensed as a denturist?
Correct. Yeah. And then after it was a dentisturist for, I was for 10 years and I was still wanting to explore the digital space and we kind of got caught waiting for it to be available, someone to just make it available to the market. And so we had been working with all of the really, really early versions of dental software, trying to make it work. Dental wings, I was one of the first people to have a seven series scanners and start with them. I went to Germany and visited Exocad and tried to convince them to get into dentures. I had a denture that we had printed with the beta version of three shapes denture software, and I brought it to Exocad and I begged them to do it too. So like I had been trying to really get digital dentures to be a thing for a long time, but you know, there's a reason that we were last. because it's really hard. It's probably one of the hardest things to do, right? 'Cause we have arbitrary occlusions. We have, you know, our base is a waterbed that moves around on us, you know, so, you know, that.
Was-- Yeah, it's not a hard margin.
Not at all. Yeah. And so I started to like pick away at my early dreams of being an inventor and I filed a patent or two, and they turned out to be, you know, something that was unique. And then I realized that there was a weird thing in our college bylaws that if you're a patent holder and you don't want to give it away to the memberships for free.
Really.
You're not allowed to be a member anymore.
All right, tell me why, I'm curious.
It was in our bylaws. So it's actually part of the college, the Health Professions Act, as we call it here, bylaws. And maybe the reason was that they didn't want someone to, you know, find out some much better way of doing things and then leave everyone else in the lurch. So I can maybe understand some of the... logic behind it. But to be honest with you, people like Robert are far better at being chairside with patients than I ever was. It was never something that I was gifted at. I liked it, but I didn't have that thick skin that some people have and I took all my problems home with me. And so, you know, I like to solve problems that don't have names. You know, I feel like those problems I can solve.
You're an engineer.
Yeah, that's exactly right. At heart, I really am. And so this is really where partnering with people like Robert, who are exceptional clinicians, and Kaylee, who's an exceptional designer, you know, that's the only way that I was going to amount to anything is by finding people that were good at their respective arts. And so we started with Perfect, and we really tried to... go end to end. Machine, software, everything. We were basically trying to do what the PM7 did with Ivoclar, but with metal and really trying to push the envelope. But of course, it was a very big, hairy, audacious plan that we ran into reality a few times, you know. And so I think this is a great place to bring Robert and Kayleigh into the conversation because that's when we met them, you know, trying to figure this all out.
Yeah, well, what a great segue for Robert and How did you guys all meet?
Go ahead. Interesting question.
Nobody remember?
Well, oddly enough, I had a colleague of mine that attended the Digital Denture Study Club that George was dealing with in BC at the time and sort of got my attention saying, hey, you have to look at this. There's really something here you have to look at.
I'm going to jump in. I'm going to jump in right now. Sorry, you cannot take credit. I cannot take credit. That was the late, great Esther Swinning, who you've had on the podcast before.
Oh, yeah, you know what? Esther was so amazing.
Yeah.
I really, really, really respected her.
Yeah, she was the guiding light and the whole force behind that. So I just have to interject that. Sorry.
Yeah, no. Very well said, George. And I think the point that I had, listen, I'm a clinician with an analog practice. At this point, when I meet George, I've been practicing for 30 years.
30 years.
And all we ever did was an analog process. Now, these were high-end dentures and lots of, you know, 50% of my practice is implant-supported dentures. But as that tide turned towards digital, There was something in me that I just found it very intriguing. And let's face it, we all need to learn. We all want to learn. And there's something exciting about learning. And I think for the first time in 30 years, I was excited again about making teeth. And what really stood out about what Perfect was doing was just something that nobody else was doing. There are lots of ways to make a full denture digitally to design it. But when it comes to partial dentures, this is the This is the great hope that everybody has. How can a digital partial denture? And there are little side shoots to that. you can design and send off a... a frame to be printed and it comes back into an analog workflow with the whole idea of taking from start to finish. And when you think about these mixed cases, a full upper denture against a partial lower denture, and you're going to make half of it with an analog process and half of it with a digital process, I really fumbled with that idea. I wanted digital to remove all of those cumulative margins of error that are common in the manufacturer of a venture, right? You take, I say this to my patients all the time, I take an impression that shrinks 2% before your home, we pour a model that shrinks 2%, and then we manufacture a denture, and by the time this goes in your mouth, we're down 8%. Why do you think I have to grind it to fit? Yeah. Straightforward. That's a lot of good clients. What digital allowed us to do was erase all of those margins of error and really move towards an end product that required less adjustment, less everything. But the partial denture was the problem because there was just no way to do it. So here comes Perfect with a way to produce out of a mill, titanium milled partial with teeth and acrylic. All you have to do is polish it once it comes out of the mill. And even the polishing is negligible. But that's basically where we're at. And, you know, I have always felt George had a tiger by the tail with respect to designing the partial denture workflow because It just allowed us now to digitally produce the entire case instead of producing, let's say, the upper denture digitally, then what, handing it off to an analog technician so we could mount it, incorporating a margin of error. Let's let the poster set. It's just a constant ongoing problem. And so this really gave us a chance to design it, produce it in the mill, and just kind of let the magic happen. But in fairness, this has been some, a truly Canadian expression, some tough sledding. The first case. Tough sledding? The first cases, the first cases that we did were not ideal. And it made me realize that what we needed to do was incorporate design in-house. Because if you think about it, where are frames made? Well, they're made in labs that make frames. And I'm a denturist, I make dentures. I sure didn't make frames. I designed countless of frames over the years, but we would always farm them out to a commercial lab. They would return to us a naked skeleton upon which we did all of the rest of the analog process. When you're talking about a digital process, now it was giving us the chance to realize that we had to learn how to design frames. We had to learn what were the offsets? What were the, how can we make this thing work in the mouth, not just on the screen? And that's, sort of going back and forth with George, that's where we, fell into place. And quite frankly, it was Kaylee that learned how to make this stuff all beautiful for us and make it work. I've designed frames, but I was certainly not a frame designer. When I think of designing frames, I'm talking about drawing a picture on a lab script. It's a far cry from designing A-frame. I was certainly not an analog technician in that sense.
So when you got into digital, did you start designing yourself or does Kaylee come into play first?
Well, just prior to Kaylee's arrival, I would say that I spent many nights on a lap trying. And other than if you've dealt with TreeShape, other than stumbling across those early errors that would really keep you awake for hours, the only time I was designing was at night. And our first foray was into printed transitional dentures. We would just go the easy route. And once we have the mill through Perfit at the time, that's when we started expanding the design, if you will. And that's where I knew I needed a Kaylee to help me through this. And quite frankly, we had we had placed an ad on Indeed. And I remember doing an interview over Zoom with her from Australia and who'd have thought it just talk about falling out of the sky. She happened to be interested in a gentleman who lived in Ottawa, and she was moving here, and I was like, the stars aligned, and the rest is history.
All right, Kaylee, let's hear your story.
Yes, so I'll go back a little bit. So when I was 19, I started dental assisting, and I just fell in love with everything dental. And casually, I guess, through work, I was given more opportunity to do some lab stuff, and here and there I'll do, you know, wax flat blocks, special trades. just the basic things. And then eventually I was like, I think I like the lab stuff more than the dental assisting side of stuff. Yeah, I like the creativity part of it, I guess. And I decided to do my studies. I did my studies in Melbourne. So I moved to Canada and I started with Rob. And yeah, it's been a massive growth experience for me as a technician and as a person living abroad. And I guess with Rob, I was given the opportunity to actually do stuff. He trusted me to try new things, make mistakes, not worry about those mistakes, if you will, And that gave me the confidence to keep building my own.
That sounds like a really perfect opportunity.
Were you designing frames in Australia?
No, I wasn't doing, honestly, before I came here, I wasn't doing anything to do with lab, really. This was my first real job. And I started here with full dentures and then started to go towards the frameworks, which are tricky, but we've definitely.
But you had some scree-shaped experience.
Yeah, just at university.
Yeah.
But it's, you know how university is, like they grade you on. on a crown that isn't actually that good.
Oh yeah, totally.
They're a little bit too lenient.
Yeah.
So Robert, how did you know that it was time to get a digital designer for your practice? Like that's a big deal.
Well, that was, as I said, I was looking specifically to hire someone that could come in and be a digital technician. I had at the time, I can't remember. It might have been three or two, at least two analog technicians, and we were looking for a digital technician to come in and fill those spots of the digital void that we'd created. So really, it was a case of learning from each other. you know, listen, I've made dentures for a long time. I know what I want to do, but don't confuse me with someone that understands the finer workings of the software. I can design a full denture, but, and, you know, I could easily figure out a partial denture. That's not the problem. I think my challenge would be more in importing the scans and all of those other more skilled aspects that Kaylee, you know, brings to the table and, knows how to be quick and efficient. It would take me two hours to digitally set up a full denture. I could probably do it 30 minutes in an analog world.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah, I get you. I get you. It's complicated sometimes just setting up cases.
But what I would say though is it's extraordinarily easy to teach digital setups. For someone with an analog background to sit and have the screen in front of you and to be able to talk about tooth position and relationship to the resorbed bridge and that it's remarkably easy to be a good instructor in a digital world when you've got an analog background.
Good point. All right, George, what is Perfect?
Well, I mean, Perfect was how we started, and now Lab Pilot is what we've grown into. And so what Lab Pilot is, you know, it's all good. It's, you know, we're trying to still get used to it ourselves. It was really basically the evolution, just like the great Labs.io guy. I remember he was talking about giving away scanners and that whole model. And so we were essentially running down a model of end-to-end, where we were providing the material, the cam file, the everything. We'd supply the machine. And so we were like trying to get basically the PM7 type model. But the challenge that we found was that, it was a lot to take on and it was really down to support. Support was the bottleneck and the products were amazing and the workflows were great. But to make the commitment to a user that you're going to use something that's going to be reliable, scalable, dependable, that is different than like a proof of concept you're a beta product. And so really that was the lessons that we were learning is like the lessons of product maturity and going from an idea to a proof of concept to an alpha, a beta, minimum viable product, and then actually a mature product. And if you come to market before you're ready, you basically get into that support trap. where you're just trying to patch the holes from the day before and then you'll have time to be able to improve it, but the day's already done by the time you patch your holes and the next day starts with the same challenge. Really it was about trying to understand what we could do and fully support and have success on both sides. And Robert and Kaylee are amazing for helping us really mature and go through that product lifecycle and understand like how scalable is this really? And so that's where like something really strange. Again, serendipity seems to knock on my door often. We had a customer request to do a reline, like a traditional reline using our method. And I'm like, well, I guess so. I can't see why it wouldn't work. What if we just used a puck like a flask and you could put your reline in there and scan the tissue fitting surface and then add and mill it down. Like it would even fit better because we know milled bases fit better because they don't have the warping that Robert was talking about earlier. And the interesting part too is that, well, if we could do that, we could do wax ups, we could do a lot of different things because it's the same analog world. So carded teeth, wax, all that stuff can come back, but still have the advantages of digital. And that was like a, my god moment and also a little bit of kick yourself in the pants moment because like why didn't you start here? That would have been a lot smarter place to start. And so what we've called it is the trad digital. You know, it's traditional and digital together and that's really how how we saw Crown and Bridge evolve, right? Like the Roland 1551 changed the game because they made it cheap and easy and people could take their diagnostic wax ups and scan them and have a, you know, zirconia copy of it. And so that's what let them get more comfortable with it. And then they started to do digital design in CAD and then they started going modelus. You know, so like you can see the evolution that it already has a good precedent in Crown and Bridge. So, what the reason that it blew up in Crown and Bridge is because it did become cheap and easy, and right now, if you want to make a denture, you can buy the PM7 and Three Shape software and all the different accessories that are required to go with it, and that's a very large investment to have to do to make your first denture. the ROI is a bit down the road. And so what we really realized was that in order to get the 80% of people that are still analog to really take this seriously, is we did need to make it a lot easier to use and also meet them where they were at instead of asking them to stretch and come join us in the crazy land where we're playing with all these wonderful things. And one of the funniest things too is that, you know, when Kaylee's been posting this online, most of the comments are like, AI, fake, no way. And we were laughing in the background, it was like, Oh, we wish it was AI. It would have been a lot easier, trust me. Yeah, but yeah, it is unbelievable. Holding this in your hand really makes you go, like, What am I even looking at? Like, it does leave you in that state of disbelief, like this is somehow magic. And that is an amazing feeling that never really gets old. But to only have that be in the hands of a few, I think, is a bit of a crime. So figuring out really how we can get digital to start touching people's lives, customers' lives, get better fitting cases sooner. That's the end goal for all of us. So really that's been about how do we actually accomplish this. And that's what Esther, and us founding the digital study club was all about. It's really trying to help people make that leap. and try to make it easier at every step.
So I'm curious, how did you know and get connected with Esther? I saw her a lot on social media and that was how I found out about her.
We happen to live in the same neck of the woods, so that was great. And so we had a lot of the same people in our networks. And Esther changed my life, I'm not gonna lie, in more than one way. The first way she did was, she was one of the first. She was a pioneer, as you know, and so was I. And it was a really lonely world in the first couple of years, right? Like there wasn't a lot of us. And not only did she show that, you know, this was possible, but she had fun doing it. Like she made it look like it was the greatest thing ever. And that was so infectious. And like we had the idea of a digital study club and she filled the room in weeks. Like it went from concept to reality remarkably quickly. And that woman had absolute magic in a bottle and I miss her every day. But it's part of the legacy she leaves behind is like really helping people, not being secretive. We're lab technicians at heart and we all keep our secrets and we all have our secret techniques. And we had to break out of that mold. We had to be like, look, for this to work, we just have to share how we're doing it. And guess what? We're not really in competition with each other. There's more than enough fish in the sea for us all. So that was really what she was, amazing at. And her, it lives on.
You could just tell that she was really passionate just by the way that she talked and everything that she did. She was really, really an amazing technician and person.
Is her brewery still there?
Yeah, Trench Brewery is still there. Yeah, she, yeah, there's a lot of things that she touched that are still around. They'll be for years.
That's amazing.
Yeah, she's the godmother.
All right, George, I'm going to ask you again. What is Lab Pilot? I don't understand, what is it? I mean, is it a mill?
No, it's now, so it used to be. We used to be locked to one machine, and we used to lock to one thing, but now we are opening up to all open machines. So Roland's, your IMIS, your Orems, your Redons, everything that we can get our hands on and we want to open up to. And the other thing that we want to do is we want to make CAD/CAM that doesn't need CAM. and doesn't need CAD.
What the?
So like the reline thing, you just take a scan of the reline in the puck and then you upload it and then you get your machine file. So you never actually went through any steps of CAM and all you did was upload it to the internet and then got your machine file. And it's 10 minutes later. So that's the amazing part of what we've been able to do with the old world is like looking at the valuable pieces that we had developed. And hey, Cam takes a long time to figure out. And you've had Jordan on, Greenberg, and it's great being able to make your own strategies and tweak and everything, but that does require certain skill level. And so what we wanted to do is really take that complexity off the table and give it to the users that are capable. But most people, the 80%, they just want it to work. They just want to have that person smile. So what we tried to do is make it easier. So it's all based in the cloud. So it is the first CAM that we're aware of that is cloud-based. And there's no subscription. It's all per case. It's just 20 Canadian pesos per job. So it's like 13, I think it's 13 American dollars, something like that, but it's like very low cost and there's no obligation. So that was the big challenge with Cam too, is that it was a big investment and you added to the machine, it's an even bigger investment. So just trying to take away the barriers.
If we simplify, because I certainly get a sense of it's confusing to answer that question.
It's very, I don't know what's going on.
So just imagine.
Is it design software? What's going on here?
Let me simplify for you. Thank you, Robert.
Thank you.
Imagine we have finished our clinical design. We have a digital design, whether it's a full denture or a partial denture. And now...
Three shape or anything.
Right, we're working with Three Shape. So let's imagine we want to make that denture a final product, and we would upload our full denture, in this instance, to LabPilot that will turn around and spill out the cam that we need to produce it out of the mill, okay? So it's basically a communication. So in the early years, what we were dealing with, George, we would send them the file. They would put on their special sauce and they would send it back. Now, it doesn't sound like much with a full denture, but let's just put this into perspective with a partial denture. Because a partial, in our instance, is a milled titanium frame with a milled acrylic and milled teeth, all as a monoblock. So you can imagine on the screen, not just a designed frame, but you're designing a frame with teeth and acrylic a monoblock.
Wait a minute, this puck is coming with three different materials.
No, no, no, that's that's the point. We are we are melding these things together to make it all work. So we begin with a titanium frame. So we'll we'll mill the titanium frame. We'll also mill a tooth puck, if you will, that allows for the frame to be loaded in. And then we add the acrylic. So without getting into too much of the finer details, we've taken a titanium frame, a tooth puck, and pink acrylic, and we've made that one solid block that is now in the mill, getting milled into a finished denture. So it's, you know, George can fill in the blanks on that, but the reality is the titanium frame is partially milled, the tooth puck is partially milled, We add in the acrylic, and it's finally milled all together as one piece.
So it's almost like sandwiched together, kind of.
Yeah, essentially. But yeah, it's monolithic, right? So we're looking at a monolithic block, and inside that monolithic block is teeth colors, and pink colors, and metal. And so what we've done is figured out a clever way of being able to add these different things together. You know, think about your oversized milling solution from your PM7, right? So you're taking your pink puck and then you're adding your teeth and then you're bonding them in and then you're machining your final. So in that respect we have two different materials that we're working with where you're adding one to the other. In this case here, we just have an extra one. So now we just have metal that we're also adding in there. And then we're getting a final product out that is now composed of metal, plastics, and pink acrylics. So we can also incorporate any kind of tooth material we want in there. So it can be your high-end Vita or your more economic pucks. It really is whatever the user wants to use. And so that requires Kaylee to be able to design your framework file, your Keith file, and your monoblock file, and so that was... great working with people with that knowledge. Unfortunately, they just don't grow on trees as much as I would love to shake that tree a couple more times.
Yeah.
So that's a bit of the challenge is that like eventually the world will be full of them and that'll be great and I will rejoice. But until that day, we had to figure out also where to meet denturists and labs where they were at right now. So the simplest operation of LabPilot doesn't even need a design. So we're not starting with a three shape or a an Exocad design, we're starting with a scan of a reline and that has been placed into a flask and that flask can go into a milling machine. That flask, you mill it out of a PMMA puck and you keep reusing that flask over and over and over. So it's exactly like the old world that we're in where we're just flasking, but instead of pouring up your model on your tissue fitting surface, you're scanning it. You're preparing your reline, you're adding more acrylic, and then you're milling down a perfectly fitting tissue fitting surface. So.
All right, someone's going to have to stop here because this flask business is confusing.
Yeah, I know.
It's like a $300 flask is a huge metal molded in. You're right. Hydraulic pressed. I'm really confused.
Yeah, imagine that we only have half of the clam shell, right? So imagine that we're only using half of the flask and that material is not metal. It's going to be a 30 or a 35 millimeter puck, an acrylic puck. We're going to mill a container so that you can put like a plaster and a re-line teeth side down into it so the tissue side is facing upwards. So you're.
Taking the patient's previous denture, wash impression, stick it into a half a flask with the intaglio surface sticking out.
Correct. And then we scan it. Yeah, exactly. And then we scan it. And so now we have a very high quality image of what we want the final tissue fitting surface to be. So essentially, it's just a 3D Xerox machine. So we already know what the final design should be. It's that impression that I see right there. So we send that file off to the cam, and the cam pretends like it's a full big block, and it's going to mill down exactly the surface that it just scanned. So after the scan, we can take the impression, the wash impression out. We can prepare the denture surface, reduce it a little bit more. We add our acrylic, and now we're going to be almost making it flush with the top of the puck flask. And then we just machine down exactly what we already scanned. So we have an amazingly fitting, and the thing is, it's in half the time as a regular analog reline, 'cause we only have one plaster stage and one adding acrylic stage. So it's faster and it takes about anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on how big and what quality you want for the fitting surface. But it's easy and it's in the machine.
How do you get the new surface to attach to the old denture?
So what we're doing is we're using your regular acrylics, the ones that you'll already be using. So whatever acrylic someone's already using, instead of squeezing it between 2 sandwich halves, what we're doing instead is we're just going to fill it all the way to the top. So one side is going to be overbuilt completely. And as soon as it's cured, now we machine it down to the perfect fitting surface.
Robert, Robert, you've been doing the old style for 30 years. This had to have blown your mind.
I would throw in A1 little thing to say that we don't mill pink pucks. We mill pink acrylic. Okay, so the easiest way to describe it is we're not milling a solid block of pink, a pre-manufactured, we're making our own pucks. Out of acrylic? Yes, we're making our own acrylic. So we're adding, in the case of a full denture, or partial for that matter, we use Dentsply HIPAA acrylic. So this material flows, if you've ever worked with it, it flows beautifully, bubble-free, just brilliant. So you pour in the prescribed amount amount of acrylic, you let it set, cure it in a pot under pressure, and now you've got your puck attached to your teeth. So you've got your pink now attached to your tooth block. And again, now it's billed as a monoblock, right?
So this is interesting because this makes those pucks cost what? Couple bucks? No, because you're using this old.
We've estimated as high as five.
Yeah, it's insane.
And that's the nice thing too, is that it's the material is just up to you, right? If you want to use a high-end pot, you can.
All right. Interesting. What would you think of all of this? I'm kind of curious.
I was just listening and thinking it does sound quite confusing if you don't have the visual representation, I guess, to go. I posted a video on my partially bitten page on Instagram. It's from June 3rd, and that kind of shows the process. It's to visualize the idea of making your own pink pop, because it is a bit confusing. But I think since working here, I've underestimated how exciting this aspect of manufacturing is, just because I'm doing it every day. But when I started posting online, I was like, wow, this is cutting edge.
And I can comfortably say in the 38 odd years of doing this that I've never had such, for lack of a better term, sexy frameworks. You're looking at them and going, wow, they have to have curb appeal. You have to be able to hold it in your hand and say, wow, that looks beautiful. And even something as simple as, let's say, a four or six implant over denture, where you're going to have a metal portion, a metal reinforcement. We can do that all out of the mill. So we're literally producing out of the mill, titanium frame, teeth, pink, you know, it's a brilliant finish of the frame and how it connects to the acrylic. Not like anything you can do with analog. And never mind what you can do with metal teeth in a tight occlusal space. Oh yeah. It's just brilliant to be able to incorporate that stuff. You know, metal onlays, things you could never do in an analog world, at least not well.
And these frames, they fit, right? Like how do they fit?
Oh, absolutely. They fit, right? So what we're seeing are frames that, this is a really good question. I'm glad you asked that because it's the fundamental difference between a technician and a denturist in that sense is that we as denturists actually get to see how that framework fits in the mouth. And there is a There's just a reality that when A-frame fits, that clicking sound it makes that just snaps into place, where it's not too tight, not too loose, and this is one of the things that people don't realize about analog frames, and for all of the accuracy of that casting. analog frame really fits because of that electro polishing, right? You're taking away all of that extra fitting surface. Success with a partial framework, analog or otherwise, is about going in, not creating pressure, not creating any tooth movement, ease of removal, but at the same time still being secure. So what we're seeing is frames that literally snap into place in a way that titanium, only titanium could do. titanium clasps can be thinner and more, less adjustment needed. The rigidity of the clasp stays longer. But we're seeing frames that truly fit the way they're supposed to. And part of that is just learning how to design them, learning how to block out. not getting wound up in all of the detail that is digital. Because let's face it, the minute you scan a model, if you weren't an analog technician, you wouldn't realize that you needed to block out all of those areas to make this thing actually fit.
Yeah, and I think that's something we learned over time was we were being too accurate. We were trying to thread the needle way too thin. And through time, I was just adding more block out in the areas where I was seeing adjustments when needed in the lab. And I think now we're at a point where hardly any adjustments are made in the lab and no adjustments in the clinic.
And it's as ridiculous as it sounds, I could scan, I'm comfortable saying this, I could go into the mouth, scan an upper and lower arch, and let's assume it's a tooth-borne partial, I could scan upper and lower arch, scan the bite, and return a finished denture the next appointment. That's a male titanium frame. We're that confident now. And it's kind of funny because if you think in the analog world, how did you do this before? Well, you took an impression, you had a frame made, and maybe at the bite registration appointment, you tried that frame in with some wax on it. A week later. And if the frame didn't fit, well, you tried to grind it. You do your best at getting it to fit.
And if you-- So you're out a lot, just saying.
Absolutely. And then you would in the end take another impression when you'd finally given up. So in a digital in the digital delivery of that same denture, all of those adjustments are done at the insertion appointment. And so where we're at right now is I'm not doing any adjustments anymore. Now they're just clicking in. When we first started this, oh, there was a lot of cursing because we didn't have the success. We didn't know how to design a frame that didn't get overwhelmed by the digital accuracies, because we didn't have electro polishing to save our butts in this, right? We had to find a way to make it fit without fitting too much. And that's really threading the needle on a digital framework. And that's been the back and forth with George, because, you know, we would... we're the front lines here. We're trying this in the mouth, turning around and saying, okay, George, that really didn't go as planned. And George would be, okay, let me look at that. And so we've had this great relationship where nobody seemed to fear making a mistake. And I said this to Kaylee when she first started, if I've realized anything in this business, it's not about Making mistakes, you're gonna make mistakes. It's how well you solve the problems that you create for yourself. You know, in an analog lab, what happens? You've got a wonderful model that you drop on the floor, and it's all about how well you can put that thing back together and still end up with something that works. It's not that you won't make mistakes. You just got to recover from them.
Yeah, you know, from my history, everybody makes mistakes in the lab. That's just happening.
Yeah, and that's the differentiator for success, is I've really discovered that, right? Is that you can work with people and they say they have great designers, but until you've really circled that square, you've connected those dots of why am I having this issue? And that was really the biggest thing that was preventing us from going to the mass market, was that we just don't have an army of Kaylee's and Roberts that have made those connections solidly together. So it's not the technical thing that's holding us back. It's just about the, we need another generation of users that understand digital design and the nuances therein. And so that was part of the reason why we decided to do a right-hand, left-hand thing where I want to be able to do things like carded teeth, like wax. I want to be able to help all those people. But at the same time, we know where this is going. And we know that we just need to mature this a little bit more so that we can have a world full of Robert and Kayleys instead of just a few of them. And that's unfortunately the case right now. There's just so few of us. You can probably count us on two hands.
And I think I would add to that, you know, when we first started working with George, we were dealing with a digital technician that had no analog experience. So you can imagine someone highly skilled in three-shape that could design A framework that looks beautiful, but never had to address all of those issues. Analog techs had worked out over the millennia, right? They had to learn how to get A-frame to actually not only fit a model, but fit a mouth. And I think that's when Kaylee came along, when it managed for me was to incorporate the design service in-house. So when the design went south, we could look at each other and go, Yeah, that didn't work. And we could fix it. And so, you know, I can't tell you how many times we did things twice because we knew that it was not an optimal result. But that's really the point. I think keeping everything in-house and and finding those people that can design with analog skills in mind to produce a digital product.
I've seen a lot of beautiful frames and they don't fit. The big difference between having one that can fit and look good.
Yeah, well, you hit it on the head. I mean, Kaylee has come to me with things that she's found online. We said, what do you think of this? You know, they would be this spectacular design. It's completely impractical. It's shiny. And it is a food trap from hell on everything. But it really looks good. It looks really beautiful. It looks really beautiful from an artistic perspective.
Instagram dentistry. I love it. I have a question about the mill. So you said this works with a couple of different mills, but all those materials, don't they all need different burrs? Can you use a titanium burr? I mean, don't you need something special?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, and really the machine is where we started on this one, right? Because we were one of the first people to start machining titanium in a big way. And we were not wanting to get the half million dollar machines that are very capable of it, but really not practical for an everyday user. I spent years looking around the world trying to find the best machine I could find for this. And we ended up buying, nearly buying a German machine company. Then we ended up with Redon out of Turkey in Istanbul.
And that-- We've heard of them before. Yeah.
You know what? Honestly, the strongest machine in that footprint that I've ever seen in my career. And I was told by the Germans that what they were doing was impossible. And then I got to see it. I'm like, OK. And the machine is entirely full of German components. So it's like it's a very robust and great machine. But, you know, it's difficult selling a machine that isn't from a Western country. And that is definitely something that we notice a little bit of pushback on. And so as much as I love the machine, and I think it's capable, and if someone asked me which machine should I get for metal, I would recommend that one. But at the same time, for us, We want it to be relevant to as many users as possible. And so not everyone wants to make metal. And so that's why we are also looking for the Roland 53s and your more everyday machine that isn't necessarily meant to mill any metal. But turns out, you can. And so we were looking at our multi-material processing and looking at printed metals. And so it turns out that if we're not starting with a big metal block, but we only have a little bit of metal there, we can very carefully shave it down in machines that were otherwise never able to do it. So that's the exciting thing that is coming next. But we also want to start using those machines just to do regular dentures and everyday relines and the things that people are doing every day. So they get more and more comfortable to start to explore more in the digital space.
We run two red on mills and sort of following in George's thoughts and just knowing that we needed it for titanium and that's where we're at.
What scanner are you using?
Benchtop's an E4.
Okay.
Three shape, and I have a Trios 4. It's got a few miles on it now.
Yeah, sure.
It's an IOS, so.
I get to have the bragging rights. I think I was the first insurers in North America to have a Trios. It was a Trios color pod. It looked like a bazooka. You know, the massive, massive one. Oh yeah.
See, that was the only scanner you could play Pong on too, wasn't it?
You can probably hold someone up with it too. Yeah, it's pretty fun. But it was funny because back in those days, like the cross arch distortion was a big deal for us, right? Like we tried to make partials right in the very beginning. So that's what we first started getting the trios for, was trying to get an actual framework. And it turned out that the cross arch was so bad we could only make flippers. And so we started out making the world's first digital flipper from an iOS to same day, let's get it in your mouth. And we didn't even have software at the time that could redo it. So we didn't even use Exocad or 3Shape. We used a small French company called C4W that was actually making partial framework software. And it was all we had to put all these people together just to be able to get a flipper out. And now, it's something that we can do without even thinking about it. So it's been really interesting to see the whole industry mature. Now it's just about getting it adopting. Like that's the problem is that these have been there for many years now, but we're still not able to crack that 15, 20% level.
How does towns north of Vancouver become the... epicenter of digital removable.
Esther.
Fascinating to me.
Esther.
I guess. I mean, yeah, I know she was a force, but...
I would also throw in edentialism. I think which...
I see what you're saying now.
But the legs aren't all red. Not all of them.
I think there's another major thing and it's the Canada factor, right? Like in Canada, dentures go for more. Like we pay more for dentures and therefore denture tourists are able to afford more expensive equipment to be able to do this. And I think that that's really what differentiated us from the American market, really where we had people that were capable and willing to invest in efficiencies. And that's really why I think that Canada and BC in specific really became a pioneer because we figured out ROI first. And that's the difference between a good hobby and a good business, right? Is one of them will pay itself off. And that's really what Esther was an absolute, you know, master at is she found out there was an 80% reduction in adjustments when you went from regular conventional process basis to mill basis. She knew that because she had meticulously kept every record for years. That was over thousands of clients. So, you know, it's reliable. And, you know, Robert's seeing some similar kind of, you know, Amounts, so using that and using that theory, it's like, Well, why can't we bring that to existing processing techniques? So, like, we could process with an IVO base or IVO cap and then put it into the mill and machine the last millimeter of the tissue fitting surface, so now we can have a digital fit out of a conventionally processed case. How does that work? Well, it's exactly the same as a reline. So think about it just like a reline, right? Where you can take the scan of the tissue fitting surface before you're processing it. When you're processing it, as long as the tissue fitting side is overbuilt and bigger than it should be, then you can put it into the same matrix that the reline went into, and it'll just shave down the tissue fitting surface to what you already was in the impression.
I'm going to spend some time on partially bitten on Instagram here and I'm gonna I'm gonna figure out what this is all about because.
It opens up a whole new world of possibilities So it's a long rabbit hole.
Yeah, I think it's fascinating and I think it's great I mean, but it sounds like you're really rolling this out slow. I mean, we have a lot of lab listeners. Is this ever gonna hit? Commercial labs.
That's exactly why we started with LabPilot and Reline's traditional carded teeth wax processing and this digital fit enhancement, because that only requires a scan from any scanner, intraoral or box scanner. So as long as we're scanning that impression inside of that flask puck, then we can make it work with anything. So that's the best part is that we're agnostic for equipment. Any open machine, any scanner, as long as it's an STL, we'll make it work.
But I mean, maybe I just don't understand what exactly, and we're getting up on the hour, but what you do to tell the machine, which already has CAM software?
Oh, so the CAM software has come bundled with the machine, but if it's an open machine, it's able to run other CAMs as well. Right, so it's not like you have to buy the CAM that lives on the machine, 'cause it actually never lives on the machine it lives on the PC that's beside the machine, yeah, and we're sending the file to that machine. Well, that PC installation doesn't need to be a PC installation. It can be a cloud. And everything right now is in the cloud. So we already have our Google documents and everything there. And as a support person, if I'm a CAM company, and I have all of these different PC installations, some of them are new, wonderful computers. Some of them are Windows 95 terrible ones. And so it is a support nightmare. So for us, it was able to very, very quickly update and also to have stability. and reliability. Because if we're going to do relines, we made a promise, right? Like that has to be out the door that day. Like it's not a small thing to do a reline. It's probably one of the most high stress things to do because there's no backup. You mess that one up, you are making a new set of teeth. And so that's the reason that we also wanted to like try to tackle one of the more challenging things because this is a much more reliable process.
I love it. I think labs are going to just dig on this ******** I don't know I mean I'm surprised people aren't knocking down your door.
But it's been exciting and honestly it's one of those my god why don't I do think of this earlier like it's kind of obvious in hindsight but only after you go down the hard Rd.
So what is it labpilot.com?
Or.net.net we're we're we got our eyes on the.com guys hopefully they might go away and we'll be available but yeah labpilot.net you're.
Playing that game I let yep and.
That's us right now, and that's where you will find everything. So we have some videos there and examples, but that's also where you'd go to upload your case and where you'd get your machine file back.
I love it. And you know what? Something we've learned on this podcast is you can always trust a denturist.
Yeah, you know what? Elvis and I really love hearing about denturists on this podcast. We've learned so much about what you guys do, and we're definitely advocates of it.
No, we love them. And if Robert says it works, it's going to work. So for sure. Yeah. Robert Kaylee, thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure you're busy in your practice this time of the year, just like every other thing in dentistry with the insurance.
Everybody wanting their two front teeth for Christmas. Yes.
Yeah. So we appreciate the time. And George, I mean, amazing. I love what you're trying to do and what you're bringing. It's great.
It's a passion. I'm not driven by anything else.
Yeah, thank you so much. And I don't know, George, you bringing this to any like Lab Day show or anything?
Yeah, absolutely. We'll be in there Chicago. So I hope to see you there. Perfect. And yeah, we're going to launch it right away. So this is officially taking the unveiling. So thank you for the opportunity.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, everybody.
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, have a great weekend. You too. Thanks.
Take care.
Bye now.
Bye.
See you in Chicago. A huge thanks to George, Robert, and Kaylee for coming on our podcast and talking about what we think, I know, will be huge once labs realize how much of A game-changer this is going to be. I mean, think about it. Digital relines with the cost of regular acrylic. I mean, it's mind-blowing. For those labs, limiting the amount you can do in a day because of technicians, it now opens it up to a whole new level. So everybody go check out labpilot.net to learn more. And of course, make sure you add them to your list of must visit booths at Lab Day Chicago. God, that's a two months Elvis. Holy moles.
That's insane. Yeah.
Go see them.
Absolutely. All right, everybody. Thank you for 2025. Cheers. Happy New Year. And we'll see you in 2026.
Yeah, and I will say happy New Year and be Be safe, have a designated driver, be smart, and have a great night.
Always the mom.
Yes, you know it. Have a good one. Bye. Just be happy.
The views and opinions expressed on the Voices from the Bench podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the host or Voices from the Bench LLC.