I'm tiling the toilet floor, only there's a soil pipe in the way! I saw these circular cutters that look like something from a gerbil's cage but they only go up to about 90mm and of course soil pipes are that little bit bigger. I thought cutting a hole and plonking it over the top would be prettier than cutting a chunk out of a tile, albeit that it will be hidden behind the toilet. Just wondered if anyone had seen a larger (say to 6 inch diameter) tile cutter?
Thanks, Stephen.
What about a tile-cutting blade in a jig saw? Or a tile "blade" in a dremel-type tool. Or even lowering the tile carefully over a plasplugs-type tile cutter with the guard removed?
Dave
you can hire a diamond core bit from most hire shops, cost about =A330.
That's what I used. It took a whole packet of 5 jigsaw blades to cut two semi-circular holes in a pair of ceramic floor tiles. I clamped the jigsaw upside down in the Workmate and moved the tiles carefully against the blade. Floor tiles knacker the blades.
Angle grinder + diamond disk works. With a bright light, you can get it pretty close.
I used an angle grinder for step-shaped cuts with straight lines, but can't see how to do it for a 4" diameter circle, unless you mean just nibbling away with the disc edge?
Are you actually cutting this hole in the middle of a tile? If not mark out the hole then cut radials with a wet cutter up to the mark and snap off the 'fingers'. Finish off with a ceramic file.
Pretty much stepwise until you get within 5mm, then nibbling with the disk edge at a low relative angle.
wrote
Are these floor tiles significantly harder/more difficult to cut than wall tiles? I've never fitted floor only wall tiles and rely on the old hand tile saw for the more intricate shapes.
Phil
Thicker and less brittle. Much harder to cut accurately if you're scoring and snapping, although they saw about equally well, just with a bit more meat to get through.
Floor tiles vary a lot. The ones I used were very much harder to cut abrasively. For example, they wore out 5 jigsaw blades cutting a single
4" circle. One jigsaw blade did very many cuts in wall tiles without noticeably bluntening at all. Score and snap cuts were not difficult (except the snapping was done by clamping in the workmate jaws along the score, and thumping with a fist to snap).The message from snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) contains these words:
Porcelain tiles are, in my experience, impossible to break using score-snap. You have to saw them.
Thanks for the suggestions. I did buy a grit edged blade for my jigsaw but the jigsaw did not want to know. It took ages to cut a few millimetres. I thought perhaps the blade was meant for wall tiles rather than floor tiles? It is a Bosch jig saw so I was hoping a named drill would be up to the job. It seems not.
In message , TheScullster writes
Oh yes...
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