The 9-point surgical guide checklist our designers run on every case

A surgical guide fails for boring reasons. Not exotic anatomy — a sleeve seated 0.3 mm too deep, a support surface resting on mobile tissue, or a window too tight for irrigation. Every guide we design is signed off against the same nine gates before it reaches your printer.

The nine gates

• Sleeve offset verified against the exact drill kit and handle stack, not a generic default.
• Tooth-supported surfaces limited to stable, non-mobile contacts with a defined seating stop.
• Tissue-supported designs given a defined relief so blanching does not shift the guide.
• Irrigation and visual windows placed where the surgeon actually looks, not where geometry allows.
• Insertion axis checked for clearance against the antagonist and adjacent restorations.
• Rigidity checked at the thinnest cross-section; ribs added rather than bulk.
• Print orientation and tolerance validated for the material you actually use.
• Labelled tooth positions engraved so nothing is assembled backwards chairside.
• Final mesh checked for open edges, self-intersections and inverted normals.

Why a dentist runs this, not a technician

Most of these gates are clinical judgement calls, not software steps. Our designers are dentists with 10+ years in digital workflows, which is why the checklist reads like a surgical brief rather than a CAD macro.