Curved canals: ancestral files revisited.

The aim of this article is to provide an insight into different techniques of cleaning and shaping of curved root canals with hand instruments. Although a plethora of root canal instruments like ProFile, ProTaper, LightSpeed etc dominate the current scenario, the inexpensive conventional root canal hand files such as K-files and flexible files can be used to get optimum results when handled meticulously. Special emphasis has been put on the modifications in biomechanical canal preparation in a variety of curved canal cases. This article compiles a series of clinical cases of root canals with curvatures in the middle and apical third and with S-shaped curvatures that were successfully completed by employing only conventional root canal hand instruments.