Dental demolition.

A proportion of our chairside time is spent in replacing defective restorations. However, many of the well known textbooks on restorative dentistry describe how high quality restorations should be produced, but not the techniques for removing faulty ones. This article discusses some of these techniques. It examines the removal of nonadhesive and adhesive plastic restorations, veneers, inlays, root fillings, crowns and bridges. The removal of foreign objects and posts from root canals has been described elsewhere and so will not be discussed here.