Proudly Canadian and First Responder Owned, Fast Shipping, Old Fashioned Customer Service!
AW102
Ask a professional faller what is riding in their wedge pouch and you will hear the same answer a lot: Piller Plastics, the company that invented the plastic felling wedge back in 1963. The AW102 is their 10 inch all-weather wedge, textured on both faces with a hi-vis orange top, and it has earned its place in the kits of production fallers and wildfire crews working the toughest timber in BC.
Ten inches of lift is the working faller's standard. It gives you the length to drive deep behind the bar, the mechanical advantage to pick up a back-leaning stem, and enough wedge left proud of the kerf to stack a second one when the tree needs convincing. The double-sided texture is what keeps all that lift honest: both faces bite into the wood so the wedge holds every millimeter you drive, instead of spitting back out under load.
Cheap wedges get brittle in the cold and shatter under the axe poll in January, or soften and mushroom in summer heat. The AW102 is moulded from all-weather rated material built to take repeated striking through the full swing of a BC season, from frozen coastal mornings to 35 degree August afternoons on a fireline. And because it is plastic, it will not wreck your chain if the bar finds it.
Piller Plastics is not a factory that happens to make wedges. It is a company that exists because of one. Back in 1963, founder Jacob Piller brought an injection molded plastic felling wedge to the woodsmen of the Pacific Northwest, a patented design that was cheaper, lighter, and tougher than anything in their kits, and easy on a saw chain to boot. Loggers adopted it almost immediately, and more than sixty years later that same lineage of wedges is still in production and working in timber around the world. As a family-owned shop ourselves, that is exactly the kind of maker we love to put on our shelves.
A wedge is the cheapest insurance in falling. It holds your kerf open, protects your bar from pinching, and steers the stem where you planned instead of where gravity votes. Working fallers carry three or more, because stacking wedges is how a back-leaner comes over safely, and because the day you need a second wedge is not the day to be walking back to the truck. At this price, set up your pouch properly: two or three AW102s and you are covered for almost anything a day of falling throws at you.
Drive it with a proper axe from our axe collection, keep a Silky saw on your belt for limbing, and see how wedges fit the bigger falling picture in our felling wedge collection. Working fire season? Browse our full wildfire gear collection, built by a first responder owned shop that knows what the job asks. Crew, agency, or bulk orders: info@axeman.ca or our government quote request page.