I wonder if the people who do this sort of thing ever stop to consider how great that metal tooth will be in five years time?
Oh well. Off to the doctor to get that Fleshlight Forearm removed…
I imagine airport security would be a more lively experience.
I’m vaguely surprised they could find a dentist to do this. Most of the ones I’ve come across - even the incompetent ones ( 
) - appeared to be genuinely interested in helping me keep my teeth.^ Especially the healthy ones. Ripping them out as a novelty trick for an ephemeral ad seems … wildly unhippocratic, somehow.
^ Except the wisdoms. Those bastards can go die in a fire
I assume the teeth were already missing. Don’t most rugby players have all their teeth knocked out?
Tell me about it. I’ve ground down my canines into useless flat pegs that hurt whenever I eat anything too hot or cold.
I’ve spoken with numerous dentists about it, and they all recommend against getting crowns or caps for them, and they don’t recommend pulling them out and replacing them with an implant either. They’re all wait-and-see, and say the most likely thing to happen is that I’ll eventually need a root canal some day, and the canines can be replaced when that happens.
Oh come on, it’s not like metal teeth are new and untested. This should hold up over time, although getting food caught in the bottle opener may get to be annoying.
Not really a problem. In European airports I did not have issues with the copious amount of alloy in my mouth. A decade ago it did not make problems even in the Land of the Fee Home of the TSA.
I don’t think it will be that bad. Maybe could cause overload to the underlying bone if used too frequently, otherwise it should behave like any other tooth implant. I am actually thinking about getting a version with wire strippers, sometime later…
I imagine the truly unhealthy part of this is repeatedly putting extreme leveraged stress on the steel pin embedded in your jaw bone.
And doing it while drinking beer seems like a recipe for a catastrophic failure at some point down the line.
I try to avoid reconstructive surgery on all parts of my skull.
In case you’re serious; no, they don’t. Mouthguards have been a thing, and compulsory, in rugby since before these guys were born.
This really smells of fake.
I’ve always wanted a full set of implants. Not for opening beers tho just general use.
But 100 grand is 100 grand & there’s about a million other things I’d do with it first
Fair enough, but as a person who spent more than a few years with braces (headgear, even) the thought of a huge chunk of metal in my mouth is not a pleasant one, which is to say that I’m most definitely not in a marketable group for dental implants unless absolutely necessary.
As for @shaddack’s thought about getting wire strippers, if that’s what makes you happy, then charge on. Lately I’ve been helping strip something like 3 ga. wire from an old microwave tower installation–it’s probably a touch thick for a dental implant (not to mention old, dirty, fabric covering and the like). Maybe some day we really will have people who can suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch?
Not trying to argue with you and I also don’t know how reliable this source is, but,
that site says that they replaced already missing teeth. So i guess that’s something. I kind of assumed they lost teeth regardless of mouthguards like hokey players. Getting hammered on takes it’s toll.
The thought was more about those 20 awg ones used as patch wires. Every tool has its range of uses. 
Figured that about the wire gauge, and I’ve done enough of the ‘look for the wire stripper, can’t find, just bite the damn insulation and pull’ thing to see the usefulness. But the braces, dear god the braces. They ruined me for any sort of dental equipment.
Holy shit, that is the best idea. I’ll put that on the list of cybernetics for after I get my magnetic finger implant and buy a Northpaw anklet.
The Northpaw thing looks much bigger than it could be with a little of SMD soldering. An elastic ring with the vibromotors, to ensure even spacing, 8 (or whatever) high-power outputs (ULN2008 could do the job, SMD version is small, or 8 discrete transistors could be used), one microcontroller, one 3-axis magnetometer, one charging chip, one microUSB connector, one battery (the biggest part).
I was thinking about building this into the body itself, using direct nerve stimulation instead of the indirect mechanical. Would greatly lower the power requirements. Perhaps low enough, with some further engineering, to be happy with some power harvesting (common movements, maybe glucose fuel cells fed from blood, maybe near-IR photocells as skin is fairly transparent there, maybe intrinsic existing movements like e.g. eyeblinks). The powering is what I don’t know how to do, the rest is a common neuroprosthetics and biocompatible materials for coating/housing. (Could such things be hidden in the nasal cavity, resp. the sinuses? Quite a lot of space there, hard bone around to protect the thing mechanically, lots of nerves to borrow from.)
This approach could potentially be used for all sorts of sensors, within limits of power consumption, including radiation or electromagnetic fields or snake-like thermal sensors.
According to this Stanford site, it looks like the current glucose-powered hydrogenase-based enzymatic implantable fuel cells currently are able to output about 193 μW cm-2. At least, that’s as much as they could get out of a rat’s abdominal cavity.
It looks like the main hurdle to decent power output is that enzymes are really big molecules, and the limiting factor for current output is the surface area of the anodes/cathodes the enzymes are connected to, so they’ve been mechanically compressing these enzymes and confining them with carbon nanotubes, which isn’t really amenable to replenishment of degraded enzymes.
Probably a dynamo and battery would work better than an implanted fuelcell.
I won’t even get started on how (grossed out?) much I dislike the idea of implanting a bunch of hardware in my sinuses or nasal cavity. That seems like a bad idea to me. Facial surgery is awful. I’d rather have something implanted in my shoulder or back or thigh.
But yeah, if I could get a high-rez microbolometer hooked up to my occipital lobe, that’d make me so happy.
