Scribing floor tiles

[The Medway Handyman]

Recently tiled a floor using 330 x 330mm tiles. When it came to the border tiles I used the standard scribing technique e.g. the tile to be cut was laid over the adjacent whole tile & marked using another whole tile.

This method works a treat & I've used it for tiles, laminate floor, deck boards etc.

One wall was at an angle of maybe 35 - 40 degrees to the whole tiles & when I scribed the first tile it was around 20mm too small. Next one I just marked & compared by measuring the distances & sure enough it would have been 20mm out.

Can't get my brain around this. How can it work on 'square' walls ( which are always at a slight angle) but be so far out on an angled wall?

Is it the extreme angle?

[djc]

Yes. If the whole tile is lined up against the wall then its sides are not parallel to the line of the tiling. So the distance from wall to tile-to-be-cut is not the true distance (the hypotenuse of a triangle rather than a right-angled side).

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[Stuart Noble]

I'm ashamed to say I've never got my head round that method at all. I've been shown it several times, but I obviously have some kind of mental block about it. ISTR going through a phase of marking the tile upside down and then transferring the marks to the face but, in the end, I find it quicker to just measure the 2 distances.