For those of you who haven't seen my posts in the Bracket Club forum, I'm 35 and have a missing molar in each quadrant.. severe crowding upper and lower, etc etc.
Anyway, my wife came along and snapped a few photos of the whole procedure. I had all of my brackets on in 40 minutes from walking in the door. I would say about 30 mins of open mouth time. One thing that was unpleaseant is this suction/lip spreader assy that keeps your teeth dry. I don't know if this is used for all banding or only for this tray system.
So they have to put that suction thing in, dry and etch your teeth.. then some special treatment to my bonded dental work areas and then the glue. At this time the Dr walks over and snaps the upper and lower trays over your teeth, holding each with pretty good pressure for about 45 seconds. Now they finally remove that annoying suction thing. Another two or three minutes and they peel off the clear part of the tray. The green stuff is rubbery and they carefully peel it away. Less pressure for all of this than taking impression trays off.
At this point you get your first feel for the brackets. In my case I had two more brackets manually installed on my lower wisdoms. Immediately after this they had me brush and rinse, then back to the chair for band installation.
Banding was interesting.. some pressure and not a lot of fun but it smoothed out the feel of the brackets at least! It took longer than they planned because the first wire ended up being too short and she had to redo the whole thing. Also I needed some bonding to keep my bite open for bracket clearance (temporary at least) so this took another 15 mins to do.
In my case, eating is going to be an absolute chore. Right now I feel no pain at all. The problem is since I'm missing molars, I have a span of wire between teeth. This is a problem on the bottom where I have wisdom teeth but no other molars. The wire is floating in the buccal tubes on the wisdoms and if I press down hard enough they will pop out! Easy enough to reinstall (with someone else's help) but awkward in a restaurant situation. Looks like I'll be eating at home for a long while.
Anyway I figured some of you would enjoy seeing this method of installation. I didn't know about it until I walked into this ortho office. Seems to work well enough!
Snaggle
Wow! That’s an interesting system your ortho uses and congratulations on your braces! You will see big changes really soon if you haven’t already noticed things moving. Thank you for sharing your story, I’ve never seen braces put on like that. It’s a good thing your wife had a camera there. Please keep us posted on your progress! 
