How a guard actually gets made.
No trade secrets here. The process is not the hard part — doing it the same way every time is. This is what happens between the scan and the courier.
Scan, check, press, finish.
The scan
A licensed dentist takes a digital impression of the upper arch — 15 minutes, no trays, nothing to gag on. The file comes to us as an STL or PLY.
The check
Every scan is measured before anything is built: holes, mesh density, arch width, and how far past the gum line it reaches. A scan that fails goes back the same day.
The press
The arch is 3D printed as a solid die. Two EVA sheets are pressure-formed over it at 6 bar, which bonds them into one piece rather than two stacked layers.
The finish
Trimmed and polished by hand — the slowest part of the whole build and the one that decides whether it feels right. Then couriered, 10 working days from the scan.
What it is made of.
EVA, two sheets
2mm over 4mm, pressure-laminated. Not glued, not stacked — bonded under pressure into a single body.
6 bar forming
Positive pressure rather than vacuum. It is what keeps thickness where the impact lands instead of letting the material thin out over the front teeth.
3.5mm labial
Measured after forming, not before. It clears the Academy for Sports Dentistry's 3mm minimum with margin.
A printed die
Your arch, printed in resin, so the guard is formed on your teeth rather than on an average of everyone's.
What we send back.
Every scan is measured before a single gram of resin is used. If it fails, the clinic re-scans and we carry that cost — the patient is never charged twice and never waits on a guard built off something we were not happy with.
Stops at the gum line
The one that matters. A guard is retained by the flange sitting on the gum, not by the teeth. Anything less than 3–4mm past the margin cannot be built on, however sharp the occlusal detail is.
Holes in the surface
A hole has to be filled by inventing anatomy that was never scanned. Past a certain size we will not guess.
Too coarse a mesh
A low-density scan looks fine on screen and prints as a soft, rounded approximation of your teeth.
Wrong arch width
Usually means a truncated scan or the wrong arch entirely. Caught before anything is printed.
It is protective sports equipment.
The same category as a shin guard. Mouthguards are well established for reducing dental and soft-tissue injury — chipped teeth, split lips, bitten tongues. The evidence linking them to reduced concussion risk is not established, and several sports-medicine reviews find no reliable link. We will not tell you otherwise, and anyone who does is telling you something they cannot back.