In a lot of adult cases, where our main aim of treatment is to level and align the teeth, the teeth may be so crowded that you can’t fully engage your first wire!
Here is a little tip to quickly dump the teeth (mainly) forward, so you can fully engage a wire, and get on with normal treatment progression.
Needless to say, you need to judge each case on its own merit, and this tip will work better if you are planning to get your space from proclining your anterior teeth. i.e. they are already retroclined.
So at first glance, it looks normal, nothing too exciting. I couldn’t get the UR1 fully engaged, so I’m just using two tie wings.
If you look a little more closely, you might be able to see some excess wire to the distal of the UR2, and mesial of the UL2, and this is where the magic is going to happen!
All that I have done is to build a spring into the wire, and this is how its done…
If you were to tie in a wire normally, you would have a certain length of wire engaged from 6-6. In this case, what I did was to increase this length, so in effect, I squeezed in extra wire from 6-6, and the excess can be seen in the anterior section, in the areas I mentioned above.
Now, I hear you ask, “doesn’t this wire just slip out of the back of the 6’s?” how would I keep the force in this spring?
Thats where these little stops come in handy!
These tiny tubes (called stops) fit around the wire (in this case I a 0.012 NiTi), and are crimped into position with a weingart plier (as shown in the photo).
To get the right length, you can measure wire passively in the mouth (thread it into the 6 tubes) and mark the mesial of the tube, then take it out from the mouth, and place the stops about 5mm more distal to the marks. This will give you about 10mm extra length, which is quite a bit!
You might need to play with this technique to judge how much extra length you will actually need.
Now, when you tie your wire in, do the pre-molars and canines first, then all the excess will be left in the anterior region. you will need to make little loops with the extra wire, so try to put these where the crowding is worst, and push them to the gingivae, so that it doesn’t irritate the patient too much!
Now, just sit back and wait – after about 6 weeks, you should easily be able to fully engage a 0.014 or 0.016 NiTi wire.
Let me know what you think in the comments below – and be sure to join my mailing list to get more tips and tricks to straight to your inbox!
