Piller Plastics 8" Double Taper Wedge with High Vis Orange Top

The 8" Wedge That Works as Hard as the Season Does

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 AW96 is their 8 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 millimetre you drive, instead of spitting back out under load.

✅ All-Weather Rated for Real Canadian Conditions

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.

🌲 Six Decades of Wedges, One Family Story

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.

🔧 Key Features

• 8" Length – The professional standard for felling, with the lift and reach to handle back-lean and heavy stems
• Textured Both Sides – Double-faced grip holds firm in the kerf under load, in wet wood, frozen wood, and pitchy wood alike
• Hi-Vis Orange Top – Easy to spot in the kerf, in duff, in slash, and in low light, so it goes home in your pouch instead of staying in the bush
• All-Weather Rated – Engineered to resist cold-weather shattering and hot-weather deformation through years of striking
• Chain-Safe – Saw into it and you sharpen your chain, not replace it. No metal in the wedge body

💪 Perfect For

• Professional fallers and buckers restocking the wedge pouch
• Wildfire and danger tree crews who need gear that performs in every season
• Arborists felling removals with tight lay requirements
• Firewood cutters and woodlot owners stepping up from bargain-bin wedges
• Anyone bucking on a slope who wants the kerf held open and the bar unpinched

💡 Why Fallers Carry More Than One

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.

📦 Product Specifications

• Model: Piller Plastics AW96
• Length: 8" (20.3 cm)
• Surface: Textured both sides
• Colour: Hi-vis orange top
• Rating: All-weather
• Made by: Piller Plastics, making professional felling wedges since 1963

🛒 Round Out Your Falling Kit

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.