At Whip Mix, we always love to hear how our products are helping our customers improve efficiency, increase consistency and deliver dependable results. The ProPress Sp has been doing that for many years.
Read Why Ernie Grabowski of Popp Dental Lab Loves the ProPress SP Furnace:
Our pressed ceramic restorations have grown considerably, so last year we found ourselves looking for another pressing furnace. We have a few different furnaces, but the Whip Mix ProPress furnaces we had used for many years performed well so we know we would buy another one. Then we saw an ad featuring a new pressing furnace that offered even more dependability than the previous models. It had some great features and was manufactured by Whip Mix.
When we first learned about the ProPress SP furnace, we thought it sounded too good to be true. It offered us a whole new level of true pressing control because it actually senses the movement of the ceramic into the ring in real time from start to finish. Other furnaces have preset pressing pressures and speeds, regardless of the flow characteristics of the pressing ceramic. As a result, there have been times when we have experienced short presses.
It’s fast. The new furnace promised a more controlled press that shortens the overall furnace time and it delivered. In fact, when the mold fill is complete, the table is lowered immediately. The shorter pressing time means that pressing with the ProPress SP saves time, but it also means that the heated glass is in contact with the investment for a shorter time. The less the exposure, the less the reaction layer.
It presses even cracked molds. You know it happens on occasion, you take the ring out of the burnout furnace and see a crack. Then, it’s decision time. Do you go ahead and press it, only to waste time and a perfectly good set of ingots when it fails? Or do you sit someone back down to re-wax, re-sprue, and re-invest the units? With this furnace, you just tell it there is a crack. It still presses the molten glass, but it does so in a much reduced, gentler manner. It eases the ceramic into the mold and increases the likelihood of a complete press when a cracked mold is detected. The end result is a successful press, when in most other instances, it would be a big failure!
It presses more units per ring. The furnace actually presses more units than we have been able to in the past. Its control of the pressure and speed it uses really impacts the success of pressing many units at a time. We have even pressed some unusual shapes and sizes and the SP seems to have no problem successfully pressing almost whatever we place in the ring.
It includes the firing schedules for over forty different porcelains. Talk about a time-saver! The ProPress SP comes with PC software that contains over forty of the most popular porcelains’ firing schedules for your convenience. Find the porcelains you use and simply upload them into your ProPress SP. The furnace does the rest. We were thrilled that we didn’t have to laboriously input every firing parameter of every porcelain we use. This was a great feature.
3-year or 3,750 muffle hours warranty. That is a great benefit for our lab because we have been burned before. Most furnaces are fine for a while, but after a year or even two, they start to break down. For example, the thermocouple starts losing temperature accuracy that has a significant impact on how our porcelain restorations look. We are always striving for the most natural appearance – the most natural level of translucency. If our temperatures are off, so is the esthetic result. We value firing accuracy and we have found that this furnace offers us peace of mind, because if anything happens to affect our work in a three year period, we don’t have to worry. We have looked at many furnaces warranties and most only offer 2 years.
Simply said, this solid workhorse of a pressing furnace almost guarantees the successful pressing of more units per ring, faster and more consistently than other pressing furnaces. It also is a great porcelain furnace, too. I highly recommend the ProPress SP to any lab interested in producing quality porcelain restorations.