Having trouble cutting porcelain tiles

[thistle]

I'm tiling my kitchen floor with some porcelain tiles I got from B&Q (coz they were only £6/sq m). I've done the main bit in the middle and I'm doing the bits around the edges now.

My dad lent me his tile cutter. It's a flatbed one so it will only do straight lines which is OK for most of the bits I wanted to do today.

However I scored the tile and it doesn't always snap cleanly. Sometimes the crack is random.

Am I not scoring it hard enough? The cutter is quite old - it's Texas branded

Some of the tiles are also too big to fit in the flatbed cutter. I've scored them quite deeply using the wheel off it then broken them over the corner of a concrete slab On broke prefectly, one broke but randomly not along the score line, the other was almost right but then the whole thing snapped in two when I was trying to break off a little stub that was left :

As everywhere is shut today I'm a bit stuck. I'm thinking about getting a cheap wet saw tomorrow as I've got a couple of L shaped pieces to cut too.

[tictic]

if the dry cutter you have isn"t big enought,then imo buy a cheap wet cutter with a good diamond blade..

the tiles you have from b&q you say they are porcelian..are they polished porcelain??if so they may have a transport wax on them..if so you will have to remove this first proir to sealing/grouting/sealing them.

aquamix do products to remove such transport waxes and sealers.. etc..
best of.

[DIY_Johnny]

I had that problem with my floor tiles. Its a pain the ass as you waste a lot of tiles and I ran short. There was a lot of

As TicTic noted about the blade:
my problem was that it was a cheap rail cutter from screwfix and little cutting wheels were sh*t. Needed to change them often, Took me about 10 broken tiles to work this out

Same with the diamond wheel cutter, Blade than came with it was rubbish, 3 cuts and blade was no good. TicTic is spot on a cheap cutter with a good blade is the way to go. Any cheap cutter I have seen has a rubbish blade, its how they sell them at that price.

To break the tiles, I have no clue what the correct procedure is but I placed the tile over a 10mm quadrant (over the cut line) and stood either side of the tile with a baton to even out the pressure.

Worked well for me

[DIY_Johnny]

meant to add I noted after my tiling project that its tempting buy a cheap blade but its not cost effective as you waste a lot of tiles.

The titan blades from Screwfix are not bad at all for the price!

I think Ebaurer is not great. I have a few of their tools and not all that happy with any of them

[thistle]

Thanks for the quick replies. Glad I'm not the only one who found it tricky!

tictac - Yes the tiles are polished porcelain. The first one I tried to cut had been cleaned in case it has a wax coating and had been sealed. The second one I tried was straight out of the box as I didn't see any point wasting the tiles I'd spent ages sealing!

Johnny - I feel happier that you said you were standing on them as well to break them. The neighbours were looking at me funny when I was jumping on a tile earlier

Are the blades in the cheap cutters relatively standard? Angle grinder type one?

[DIY_Johnny]

I bought these bladesand they were not bad for the price to be honest

Granted they are not great but between your existing blade and these 2, you should get the job finished no problem.

Angle grinder creates a huge amount of dust.

When I was tiling, all the neighbours heard was a scratching noise, a snap.... and then pile of bad language

[thistle]

Thanks for the tips.

I went for one of these http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/p ... CUTTER.htm

Cheap as chips at £35.

I've done nearly all the cuts I need to for the whole kitchen (I've missed one ) and it's still working although it was quite tricky cutting 600 x 600 tiles on such a little saw. They all look good but I have spent nearly all day cutting tiles

I was going to buy an extra blade from Homebase (next door to Argos) but they only had a Black and Decker Piranha which was £23! The original blade is still going strong.