The necessary improvement of the bonding of denture teeth to the base
resin has been hampered by inconsistent results and the consequent lac
k of clear guidance as to the best procedure to use. This state of aff
airs is in part due to poor experimental design. The tensile strength
of notched planar interfaces between acrylic denture tooth material an
d cold-cured acrylic resin was determined for various treatments under
a protocol designed to minimize spurious failures. The tooth material
treatment consisting of grinding and exposure to a methyl methacrylat
e-trichloromethane mixture was, of those treatments, the most reliable
in that no interfacial failures were observed. Strength was indisting
uishable from that of both tooth and base acrylic under the same condi
tions.