largest portion of the ear prosthesis and the way we do that is we

make an impression of the remaining ear

and then we will sculpt

or do a preliminary sculpture of where the replacement ear is going to go.

And in doing that we can determine where we're going to put the implant

within the prosthesis. Then the patient will have the surgery

to place the implant and we'll wait for those

implants to heal to integrate into the bone and that usually takes

two to three months and then we'll start fitting them with a permanent

prosthesis and the first step

to do that is to make the gold bar so

an impression is made of the site and this time we can capture the

position of the implants so this comes off like that.

We pour up a model. Again, then we have the

wax up which is used to

finalize the sculpture.

We have to then make a substructure to retain the ear

to retain the clips within the ear and

then finally we'll make a mould

melt out all the wax and then cast

custom colored silicone into the mould. So this is an example

of how we would custom tint silicone and

you sort of create your own palate which

many artists are used to doing, mixing pigments into

a sort of medium to create their own palate. So here you can see we have

a couple of different colors

so we have a nice shadow color and a

red colour for the rouge

and a purple color here.

These start off as a liquid and

we add a cross linker to them, we paint them

into a mould just like any artist would paint into and

then that sets up.

So that's what is involved. Usually

to make an ear will take about

25 hours of work

some with the patient and some without.