Delta Neo helps reduce the cost of dental care by inventing a compatible adaptor
No doubt you’ve experienced the sensation: your dentist, in the middle their work, takes a sort of stylus hanging from the unit to your left and proceeds to spray your teeth with pressurised air or water.
By sending small jets of air and/or water with precision through two very narrow tubes (less than 1 mm in diameter), this syringe is used to wash and dry teeth both during and at the end of a procedure. Unfortunately there is a problem: around the world, there are numerous brands and models, each with its own specific tip, for just this one function.
For a number of years now and for quite understandable hygienic reasons, disposable parts have been the norm. Yet it clearly isn’t financially viable to switch out the syringe’s original tip between every patient. Accordingly, the dentistry community has adopted the idea of using a universal disposable plastic mouthpiece after each person. But a universal shape means compatibility problems.
A major figure in the world of medical equipment then had the idea of dispensing with the original tips and having an adaptor tailor-made for each type of syringe that could receive this standard plastic tip. Delta Neo was approached with this idea and, drawing on the inventiveness of our engineering department and our extensive expertise in micromachining and assembly, we were able to offer and develop the specific design required through a reverse engineering process. The design called for months of fine-tuning, several rounds of prototyping and sampling in close collaboration with the client and lots of back-and-forths with them.
These plastic, stainless steel or aluminium adaptors, depending on the model, are only a few millimetres long and are made of one to three very small pieces that are fully machined down to a 1/100th of a millimetre on Delta Neo’s production floors. These are then assembled by hand in a series of more than ten very high-precision and meticulous steps, including gluing, grinding, deburring, engraving, cleaning, checking and so on, before being individually blister-packed along with their respective instructions for shipment. A truly flawless work of art.
Today, thousands of adaptors for air/water syringes of all models leave Delta Neo’s production floors every month and travel to destinations the world over.