Digital Denture Workflow Calculator

Digital complete-denture fabrication replaces hand-packed analog processing with a CAD-designed base that is either milled from a pre-polymerized PMMA puck or 3D printed in denture base resin, with prefabricated or printed teeth bonded on afterward. This calculator totals the case cost for whichever method is selected -- base material (puck or resin), a teeth set, bonding material, and technician labor across design, try-in, bonding, and finishing -- and estimates turnaround in business days. Milling and printing time itself is tracked separately as unattended machine time (the fabrication-time output) and is deliberately excluded from the labor cost, since the technician is not occupied while a puck mills or a part prints. Milled and printed workflows use entirely separate cost paths: the milled path only ever draws on the PMMA puck cost, and the printed path only ever draws on the resin cost per liter, so the Denture resin cost field only appears once 3D Printed is selected as the fabrication method -- it stays hidden at this calculator's default milled setting, since it would have zero effect on the total there.

Labor is the largest lever on total cost across a realistic technician-rate range, more than any single material line item, since it accumulates across design, try-in, bonding, and finishing time and scales again when both arches are selected rather than one. The traditional-workflow comparison figures (a flat lab fee per arch and a 2-3 week turnaround) are fixed reference points built into the calculator for benchmarking, not live market data, so the cost-vs-traditional and time-saved outputs should be read as illustrative rather than as a quote against a specific competing lab's current pricing -- and the cost comparison is not always a savings: at this calculator's own milled, both-arch defaults the digital total runs above the flat traditional reference fee once technician labor is included, so a negative cost-vs-traditional figure means the digital case cost more, not less. Turnaround, separately, assumes an in-house 3D printer with same-day access versus an outsourced milling center with courier and queue lag, which is why the printed path finishes a day sooner in this model despite its longer per-arch machine time -- a practice with its own in-house mill would not see that turnaround gap.