Easy Tile Cutting Trick - No Measuring!

I hope you're sitting down because today I'm going to ceramic tile my workbench and I'm just pulling your leg though a ceramic tile top certainly would be a great way to breathe new life into an old welding table wouldn't it lay them out in a pretty pattern drive them all down with some sheetrock screws this is gonna be quick and I realize this is very off topic for this channel but the boss put in a ticket for some tile work and if I have to do it you're going down with I thought I'd share a little trick I didn't invent this trick it's not new but as great as I think it is I don't really see a lot of people using it and again I don't really spend a lot of time with the tile people not to be confused with mold people to illustrate this a little better I've rotated all the tiles almost 45 degrees you can imagine you're laying down a diamond pattern you know maybe you didn't get it just right what we're talking about is cutting tiles to fill all of these empty spots you know where you've run up against the wall baseboards trim radiators kids toys whatever if you've never put down tile you know there's always something in your way in my dramatic reenactment here let's assume that these are the walls I'm working up to I'm talking about having to lay out and cut all those little pieces that fit in the oddball areas a whole tile won't get into usually you'd see people measuring it out tile by tile maybe in this case you know taking the 2 remaining dimensions marking that out on a tile striking a line and then running over the wets all to cut that out this trick requires no tape measure no ruler no square you won't need your veneer protractor digital angle gauge or a sine bar nothing except a piece of cardboard and a pencil or maybe a marker I mean you do you for this demonstration I'm just going to use a piece of cardboard if you're really going to do this use something that might hold up to the way or and tear some plastic some MDF thin plywood stuff like that this will be striking a lot of lines you don't want it to get all tattered anyway what you do is you lay the tile down and you place it at 45 degrees now that I think about it I think I've only ever used this for a diamond pattern but if you're laying out a floor at 15 degrees I don't know I think you might have to lay your tile at that angle I'll let you think about that but I'm doing a diamond pattern so I'm going to set this up at the same angle now what I'll do is add the thickness of the grout line I'd like to work with maybe you want to make it an eighth of an inch three sixteenths quarter of an inch whatever your grout line is add it to two of the corners so there and there now I'm just going to connect the dots give me a second just to cut that out and that's it the template ideally is nice and square and the size of your tile diagonal plus one grout line you'll want to take care of that your template is the right size nice and square nice and clean all that stuff any error in your template will propagate through to all of your tiles now to use this you just put tiles down sort of next to the place you want to fit them to I usually do two or three to time but feel free to go crazy align the tiles you want to cut to the tiles you already have glued down as closely as possible not the way I'm showing you here so for example this one looks a little bit crooked it's also crooked and straighten them out a little bit personally I only do again two or three at a time but this is just a drive the point home as fast as I can you just take your template bump it up against your wall or the leg of your dining room chair or whatever you're trying to tile around and just start striking your lines now those lines are probably hard to see so let me highlight them for you that's where we make the cut now I'm not going to cut these because I actually need them so let's use some CGI that piece goes there the next piece goes there that little piece will fill in that little corner the corner piece we struck goes in the corner and the rest follows suit here we did two walls at once so we're missing two pieces so we just repeat this for the two missing pieces that's it no measuring no writing anything down no cutting testing and refitting if your template is good your cuts will be good at least better than my graphics I hope but try it yourself it really does work and is a ton faster now that gets all the pieces to fit doesn't mean your wall or your floor wound up flat or your tile work any good but I used this trick to tile my entire bathroom sure the tiles stick out but they all fit I just tell people to feature if someone slips they'll have somewhere to grab on to anyway that's it nothing ground brick one sec sorry about that yeah sorry I was just getting all the stuff together what do you mean why not you said we were laying tile today euphemism

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 980,668

Keywords: ceramic tile, cutting tile, tile layout, tile template, laying tile

Id: 4m4NSWK9U6k

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018