The fit of gold-alloy full-crown castings made with ceramic casting ring liners

Measurements were made of the fit of gold-alloy full-crown castings produced with dry ceramic ring liners. When used with vacuum investing, these liners absorb relatively large amounts of water from the investment mix (thereby reducing its original W/P ratio) and then function as wet liners, thus increasing the investment's potential expansion and giving castings which are consistently larger than when air investing is used. With four of the five liners tested, investing in air produced many castings which were unacceptably undersized (inaccuracy worse than -0.2%). The fifth liner, an industrial material 2 mm thick, gave only one casting out of 12 which was outside this limit, although all castings were undersized to a lesser extent. Vacuum investing gave improved casting accuracy; with four of the five liners, the improvement was highly significant (p < 0.001), and with the fifth, probably significant (p < 0.05). Even with vacuum investing, however, with only two of the liners did all castings show inaccuracies within +/- 0.2%. With the other three liners, some castings (ranging from 2/10 to 7/9) had inaccuracies worse than -0.2%. With both air and vacuum investing, changing from one liner to another caused changes in relative casting accuracy which were often significant (p < 0.01) or highly significant (p < 0.001). In casting techniques where a ceramic ring liner is used, the choice of specific lining material and the choice between investing in air or under vacuum are important factors which can have a major effect on the fit of castings.