Door wedges or door chocks are an essential part of a firefighter’s tool kit. They prevent doors from closing on the hose, reducing or cutting off water flow. They prevent self-closing and self-locking doors from swinging shut and trapping a firefighter.
Door wedges are also useful during an evacuation, and for chocking doors open for ventilation.
Door wedges made from molded polymer (thermoplastic) material, such as TPE, have two main advantages over home-made wooden door chocks.
1. The molded material is very sturdy yet pliable, creating an excellent grip on the door and the floor. Wooden wedges may be more difficult to wedge under the door and may be more likely to slide on smooth surfaces.
2. Polymer wedges are lighter than wood, but every bit as sturdy. For example, the CY Safety Products molded TPE door wedges have an open construction for light weight, combined with three internal support ribs for high structural strength. This makes them effective at chocking open even heavy commercial doors. They’re functional up to 300 degrees F.
The main advantage of wooden door chocks is that you can make them yourself out of scrap wood for practically nothing – IF you don’t consider your time to be valuable. Polymer door wedges cost less than $3 and are guaranteed to not give you slivers.
They are lightweight, sturdy, and available in black or high-visibility yellow.
This video takes you inside the CY Plastics facility in western New York, to show you how our skilled blow-molding technicians make our popular 12-flare emergency flare container.
Video transcript:
Hi and welcome to CY Plastics! Today we want to show you the blow molding process we use to make custom plastic containers.
This is our Improved B-24 blow molding machine. This is the hydraulic programming rod, the head tooling, the blow pin, and the mold. This flare container mold was designed and built here at CY Plastics in NY.
The head tooling is specific to each job and controls the way the parasin drops into the mold. We program the machine to adjust the head tooling opening and thereby vary the thickness of the parasin as it drops. We start with a pretty uniform amount for the body of the container, increase it as we get to the handle, and close it off at the top.
The parasin is extruded as programmed. The mold closes around it and air is blown into the center, forcing the parasin towards the inner walls of the mold cavity. Then we wait as the part cools.
The flash outside this pinched seal is cut off and recycled. The top opening is cut out and the edges are flamed to make a smooth seam.
This blow-molded container uses an injection-molded lid that we also make here.
This container holds 12 flares and keeps them handy and dry in an emergency vehicle, in your car or boat, or wherever you need to store them. We also make a smaller container that holds three flares. Visit our website to see our complete line of flare containers and other fire, safety and rescue products.
