Repair

Repairs to restorations are inevitable. These kits were designed to facilitate repairing ceramic restorations. As with other products of this type, you can certainly perform repairs without a dedicated kit. You probably have most of these materials anyway. But having a kit sometimes is handy, since all or most of the materials you need to use are right in front of you.

Do You Need HF?

Most products in this category still include hydrofluoric acid (HF) in their kits, but HF has no effect on zirconia. On the other hand, while these initial bond strengths are certainly not meaningless, the durability of the repairs completed with and without the help of HF still needs to be determined.

Bond Strength Test

While ease of use always is important, these products, above all, must perform. To compare their performance, we followed their directions and compared bond strength to our control, which was bonded as follows:

1. Ceramco II porcelain was sandblasted with aluminum oxide for 10 seconds.

2. Rinsed with water for 30 seconds.

3. Air-dried for five seconds.

4. 9.5% HF gel for one minute.

5. Rinsed with water for 10 seconds.

6. Air-dried for five seconds.

7. Silane applied for five seconds.

8. Air-dried for five seconds.

9. Heliobond applied.

10. Light-cured for 20 seconds.

11. Composite applied.

12. Light-cured for 40 seconds.

Control Bond Strength = 26.0 MPa

Please see the commentary for each product to see how it compared to our control.