Our In-House Dental Lab

Most dental offices do not make anything. They take an impression, put it in a box, and mail it to a lab in another state. Two or three weeks later a package comes back, and if the fit is wrong the whole trip starts over.

We do it here. At Spring Hope Family Dentistry, your dentures, night guards, surgical guides and provisional teeth are designed and 3D printed in our own lab, in our own building, on 615 E Nash Street. That one fact is behind almost everything patients notice about us: why a denture takes about three business days instead of three weeks, why a repair is usually ready the next business day, why a broken tooth on a denture does not cost you a week of eating soup, and why our prices look the way they do.

Your Teeth Are Made Here, Not Shipped Out

When a denture is made at an outside lab, the office you sit in is a middleman. They send a mold, a technician they have never met interprets it, and what comes back is what you get. Every adjustment is another envelope and another week.

When the lab is down the hall, Dr. Abboud designs your case himself on the same scan he took of your mouth, prints it, checks it, and adjusts it while you are still in the building. If something is off by a fraction of a millimeter, we fix it that afternoon instead of scheduling you for a visit in October.

What Having the Lab In-House Actually Changes for You

• Speed. Most of our 3D-printed dentures are ready in about three business days. Outside labs typically run two to three weeks.
• Repairs. A cracked base or a knocked-out denture tooth is usually repaired by the next business day, and we fix dentures made anywhere, not just ours.
• Same-day options. For qualifying cases we can scan in the morning and deliver same-day dentures that afternoon. That is only possible with a printer in the building.
• Price. There is no lab invoice to mark up. It is the reason a full 3D-printed arch starts at $1,266 while a comparable lab-made denture runs $2,655.
• Do-overs are cheap. If a try-in does not look right, reprinting costs us material and an afternoon. At an outside lab it costs you weeks, so most offices talk you into living with it.
• Your design is kept. Your denture exists as a file. Lose it or break it beyond repair and we reprint from the design rather than starting from a new mold.

Scanning Instead of Impression Trays

The lab starts with a scan, not a mouthful of putty. We use a Shining3D AoralScan Elite intraoral scanner, which builds a 3D model of your teeth and gums from a wand about the size of an electric toothbrush. No tray, no gagging, no waiting for material to set, and no distortion from a mold that shifted on the drive to the lab.

For full-arch implant cases the same scanner does something an impression physically cannot: photogrammetry, which records the exact position of every implant in three dimensions. A full-arch bridge has to seat on four or five implants at once with no rocking, and that tolerance is beyond what a conventional impression can hold. It is a large part of why our All-on-X provisional teeth fit on surgery day.

Designed Here, By Your Dentist

This is the part most patients do not expect. Dr. Abboud does the design work himself. Where the teeth sit, how they meet when you bite, the shape of the arch, how much support your lip gets: those are clinical decisions, and at most practices they are made by a technician in another time zone who has never seen your face.

He has seen your face. He watched you talk and smile during the exam, and he is designing against that, not against a plaster model on a bench.

Printed on Our SprintRay

Our SprintRay Pro 2 printer builds the finished piece layer by layer from liquid resin. We keep three materials on hand, chosen for the job rather than for convenience:

• Apex Resin for denture bases, the pink part that rests on your gums. It is our primary denture material.
• OnX Tough 2 for the teeth themselves, built to take years of chewing.
• Apex Flex for flexible partials, for patients who want a partial with no metal clasps showing.

The same printer produces surgical guides for implant placement, the fixed provisional teeth that go on the day of full-arch surgery, night guards, and 3D-printed veneers. Read more about the equipment on our technology page.

The Part No Machine Does

A printer makes a shape. It does not make a smile look like it belongs to you. Every case gets finished by hand: polished, then glazed and characterized with Glaze by Rodin and Ivoclar IPS Empress Direct tints to get the shade, the translucency at the edges and the small irregularities that keep teeth from looking like a row of white tiles.

That is the step people are reacting to when they say a denture looks fake. It is almost never the fit. It is a technician who had thirty seconds and no idea what the patient looked like.

When We Still Use an Outside Lab, and Why

We will be straight with you: in-house is not always the right answer, and we do not pretend otherwise. For premium lab-made dentures and certain complex restorative cases we work with a small number of American labs we have used for years. They are excellent, and for some cases the materials and techniques they offer are genuinely a better fit than anything we can print.

What we will not do is send your case away and charge you as if we made it. You will always be told which path your case is taking and what it costs before we start. Both options are laid out on the denture pricing page, with real numbers.

What We Make In-House

• Full dentures and partial dentures, including flexible partials
• Immediate dentures, made before your extraction date so you never go without teeth
• Same-day dentures for qualifying cases
• Flippers and interim partials
• Denture repairs, relines and rebases, including dentures made at other offices
• Fixed provisional teeth for All-on-X full-arch surgery
• Surgical guides for implant placement
• Night guards and bite appliances
• 3D-printed veneers

Nobody Else Around Here Has This

In-house digital labs are still rare, and in Nash County they are close to nonexistent. Patients drive to us from Rocky Mount, Wilson, Nashville, Bailey, Middlesex, Elm City, Louisburg, Bunn, Castalia, Franklinton and Lake Royale, and the lab is a large part of why. Fifteen or twenty minutes of driving buys a denture in three days instead of three weeks, and a dentist who can fix it before you leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are my dentures actually made?

Here, in our office at 615 E Nash St in Spring Hope. They are designed by Dr. Abboud on your digital scan, 3D printed on our SprintRay printer, and finished and glazed by hand in our lab. They are not shipped anywhere.

How long do 3D-printed dentures take?

Most are ready in about three business days. Outside labs generally take two to three weeks. For qualifying cases we can do a same-day denture.

Are 3D-printed dentures as good as lab-made ones?

For most patients, yes, and they cost about half. Printed dentures use materials built for the job and they fit well because they are made from a digital scan rather than a mold. Some complex cases are still better served by a premium lab-made denture, and we will tell you plainly which one your case calls for.

Can you repair a denture that was made somewhere else?

Yes. We repair and reline dentures from any office, denture center or online seller. Most repairs are done by the next business day because the work happens here.

Does having a lab in-house make it cheaper?

Yes. There is no outside lab bill to pass along, which is why a full 3D-printed arch starts at $1,266 and a comparable lab-made denture is $2,655. VIP Plan members take 20% off on top of that.

Can I see the lab?

Ask when you are in and we will show you. Most patients have never seen a dental lab and it changes how they think about what they are buying.

Do you 3D print anything besides dentures?

Surgical guides for implants, the fixed temporary teeth used in All-on-X surgery, night guards, flippers and 3D-printed veneers.