The first thing we do is plan where the implants are going to go because we need to fit them inside the
largest portion of the ear prosthesis and the way we do that is we
make an impression of the remaining ear
and then we will sculpt
or do a preliminary sculpture of where the replacement ear is going to go.
And in doing that we can determine where we're going to put the implant
within the prosthesis. Then the patient will have the surgery
to place the implant and we'll wait for those
implants to heal to integrate into the bone and that usually takes
two to three months and then we'll start fitting them with a permanent
prosthesis and the first step
to do that is to make the gold bar so
an impression is made of the site and this time we can capture the
position of the implants so this comes off like that.
We pour up a model. Again, then we have the
wax up which is used to
finalize the sculpture.
We have to then make a substructure to retain the ear
to retain the clips within the ear and
then finally we'll make a mould
melt out all the wax and then cast
custom colored silicone into the mould. So this is an example
of how we would custom tint silicone and
you sort of create your own palate which
many artists are used to doing, mixing pigments into
a sort of medium to create their own palate. So here you can see we have
a couple of different colors
so we have a nice shadow color and a
red colour for the rouge
and a purple color here.
These start off as a liquid and
we add a cross linker to them, we paint them
into a mould just like any artist would paint into and
then that sets up.
So that's what is involved. Usually
to make an ear will take about
25 hours of work
some with the patient and some without.