Appliance
A night guard made to fit one mouth, in this building
Copperstone Dental fabricates custom occlusal splints in-house from impressions or a digital scan, built to protect against clenching and grinding at night, not to fit approximately.
Chapter 01
What clenching costs you while asleep
Bruxism, the grinding or clenching people do overnight without waking up for it, wears teeth down in a way that happens slowly enough to go unnoticed until a filling or crown starts failing, or the flat spots on the biting surface get pointed out at a checkup. It's also a common source of morning jaw soreness and headaches that don't have an obvious daytime cause.
Left alone, the wear compounds. A crown or filling under constant nighttime force is more likely to crack. So is a natural tooth, especially if the grinding is concentrated on one side or on a few contact points, which is common when a bite isn't perfectly even.
A custom occlusal night guard fabricated in-house at Copperstone Dental
Fabricated in this building
Copperstone takes an impression or a digital scan of the teeth, and from there the guard is 3D-printed and finished in-house rather than sent out to an outside lab. Celeste, a dental assistant who's been in the field since 2008 and joined the practice in 2023, handles the fabrication.
That keeps the process fast and lets the fit be checked and adjusted against the same mouth it was scanned from, instead of a lab technician working from an impression alone with no chance to fine-tune the result before it ships back.
Chapter 03
Fit is the whole product
A drugstore boil-and-bite guard is shaped by biting into softened plastic at home, and it fits the way that sounds: loosely, unevenly, and not to the actual contours of the teeth. It can shift overnight, and a guard that shifts stops protecting the teeth it was meant to cover.
A custom guard from Copperstone is built to the scan of an individual mouth, so it sits where it's supposed to sit and stays there through a night of grinding. If jaw pain or tooth wear from clenching is a factor at all, ask about a night guard at the next visit. See /services/tmj-equilibration for how a night guard fits alongside bite correction when TMJ pain is also part of the picture.
Copperstone Dental: Most major dental insurance billed directly. In-office discount plan for patients without insurance. Call (208) 218-0329.