How to Cut Tile

Mark Le Mon: Hi, I am Mark Le Mon Project Manager and you are learning how to tile. Okay I am going to show you the basics on using a using a wet saw. I am going to cut four different types of materials. I am going to show you how to make corners on a natural stone and to smooth and polish them. Okay, here we go. Don't forget your safety glasses.

First thing we are going to do we are going to cut a Ceramic. It's pretty simple, you make your markings for where you are going to be cutting. In this case I have got it pretty set. Turn on your wet saw. Proceed to cut, nice and slowly. As you can see it gives you a nice edge. If you need to make more cuts and use smaller pieces of tile you can also shape the corners of your tile and use those for edge cuts. Alright let's move on to a Porcelain. Difference with Porcelain tiles is most of the time the color will go all the way through. So you can actually get a better corner on a Porcelain tile. Okay, here we go. Okay now I am going to show you how to cut an angle in your tile. You are going to make your markings for the distance of what you have, one corner coming to the second corner. You are going to make a L cut in to the tile. There are two different methods for doing this. In this case you are going to release the lock of your saw, you will lift it up and cut down into the tile at the corner you want then you will lock it down again. You come up the edge to match where that line meets, give it a lift up, the piece will fall off do your cleaning, here we go. If you do it like that, you will get a perfect cut every time. Now that you have ground it, it's the same all the way through. You can easily make edges on this. So what I am going to do I am going to cut a small piece then I am going to show you how you could do a nice rounded edge. So you want to take your belt sander you want to take your tile and you want to go with the grain of the sand paper. I am just going down, I will do a nice smooth rotation up into the sandpaper just like that. It's trying to go with the grain of the tile. There you have your rounded edge. Now we are going to smooth that down using a 200 grit sanding sponge dipped in water. You want to go back and forth, back and forth, then you want to go length wise with the edge and then a finish polish on the side edge. Okay, give it a rinse and there you have a nice finished edge for your grinding. Okay now you are going to learn how to do a Miter cut. First thing you want to do is set your saw depending on the Miter that you are going to use in this case. I am going to use a 90 so we are going to go 45 and 45, you will lift the blade, rotate it into position, lock it down bring your blade back down, lock it in position. Set your guide, in this case it's going to be an outside corner. So you flip your tile up side down, lock it down, proceed. Okay now you have cut one half of your outside corner. We are going to do the same thing with the opposite side. We are going to flip it over again and we are going to match these two up. When you place these on the wall you will have your outside corner perfectly miter to 90 degrees.