What Are Bonding Trays?

Making Braces Easier — Bonding Trays

The Placerville Dental Group wants to make sure your smile becomes the best it can be and then stays that way. When one of our patients opts to get braces, compared to clear aligners from Invisalign, the procedure requires a little more hardware. Installing braces includes putting brackets on specific teeth, since these create the anchors for the arch wire. As you can imagine, attaching those brackets one at a time is painstaking, meticulous, intricate work that takes the upmost accuracy from the dentist. Placing the bracket in the wrong position and then stringing the arch wire though it could lead to a misplaced tooth, requiring further adjustment. Ensuring proper placement also takes time, which is sometimes difficult on the patient. Thankfully, modern techniques and tools offer a helpful option.

It’s Called a Tray, a Bonding Tray

A bonding tray looks much like a mouthguard or clear aligner, but with a different purpose. The tray is modeled to fit over the patient’s teeth, but there are little pockets inside the tray. These pockets match the shape of the brackets for the braces — not only in shape, but also in location. Using techniques like 3D modeling and computer-assisted rendering, a dentist uses a model of your teeth to determine the exact placement of every single bracket, on each tooth that needs one. The bonding tray is built accordingly.

While this is going on, your teeth are prepared for bonding. When ready, the dentist adds adhesive to the brackets as they rest in the tray. The dentist firmly places the trays on your teeth. At that point, you add pressure by softly clamping down on the trays, often with spacers, like gauze or cotton, in between your jaws. As this pressure is applied, the adhesive material bonds the brackets to your teeth in the exact position needed to support the arch wire and bring your teeth into alignment. After enough time passes, your dentist removes the trays from your teeth — but the brackets stay in place. Then the dentist inspects the result, and afterwards moves on to applying the other components.

If you have questions about using bonding trays when you get braces, we’d love to discuss them with you. Please give us a call or schedule an appointment online to talk with your dentist at the Placerville Dental Group. Together, we can build a bond that will suit you!