Author: benjamin

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Improving the battery-powered night light of my son

My son have a nice fox night light, that he really need every night. Unfortunately, it needs batteries (3x AAA) and as we forget to switch it off every morning, it’s kind of battery consumming. (Rechargeable battery is not an option)

So I look into my stock of “Let’s keep it, it may be useful someday” and found a perfect 220V transformer !
As I didn’t want to damage the night light, I decided to keep the option to use batteries : I need to make fake batteries.

Adapting new fake batteries

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Cutting the end of the 200V transformer, soldering a screw at the end, and adding an anchor

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Ortho Project : Conclusion

That idea came around December 2019, and I try to implement it from January 2020 to March. COVID situation was a great help, because it gave me time and the possibility to wear my aligners.

I started wearing them on March 12th, and I’m currently wearing my last piece. It’s been 5 months, and I’ve almost reach my goal ! (photos will come soon)

I still want to do another round of aligners : As my teeth moved, my 3D model is not good enough to work on it, and need a more recent one. I also want to correct some small imperfections. I’m on holidays now, far from my 3D printer and tools, so I will resume it in September.

From now, here is what I can conclude on this project :

      • Time : I spend some time on this, probably close to a hundred hours between research and testing. The thermoforming part was clearly the longest, more than 3/4 of my time.
      • Money : It’s was really cheap (Alginate powder, plaster and 60 sheets of dental plastic were bought for less than 30€). I used around 1kg of PLA (15€) and already owned the tools.
      • Efficiency : It’s really efficient ! (wait for photos) Now, I need to find a dentist to put me a small contention metal cable behind my incisors to maintain them durably.
      • Pain : Ok, I had some. First aligner was new, and it was a little painful during the first 24 hours. Then, between each aligners, I sometimes feel a small pain with new ones. Probably because I wanted to move to fast between each aligners.
      • Speech : As expected, I had some difficulties to talk properly the first 3 weeks, but I get used to it.
      • Cleaning process : Each day, I needed to brush my aligners to keep them clean, same for my teeth. Mouthwash was also effective to keep a good hygiene.
      • Attendance : I was really focused during the process. Now with the summer, I’m feeling a bit bored and forget them sometimes.

 

Stay tuned 🙂

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Ortho Project : Cutting and finalisation (step 6)

Cutting was quite easy, with no real difficulties. My Dremel was enough for that, I just had to follow the “tooth lign” to only keep the molding of the teeth.

Cutting following the tooth lign

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And to keep them always with me, I 3D printed a nice box !

By the way, I had to remove the last tooth of my upper jaw for two reason: my mold was not good enough on these teeth, and the aligner was too big for my box 🙂