How to Cut Hole In TILE for SHOWER HEAD --- With the The tools You Have!

okay so a real common cut that we need to make is the hole that we need to make in the tile for the shower head that's coming out of the wall i get this question a lot so i figured i'd make a video on it if you're a diyer don't be afraid of this because we have this nice escutcheon usually on the shower arms that's quite a bit bigger than the hole that we need to make so if you don't have a hole saw and all you have is your grinder or a tile saw that you're using i can show you how to do it without a hole saw like this i've already made a few videos on how to cut tile with the hole saw it's how i would make it on a job site but often times if you don't have this hole saw it's easy to do with either your grinder or wet saw now the tools that you're going to need to have are a speed square a hammer and a chisel would be nice this is a wood chisel but i've turned it into a tile chisel and of course either a four inch grinder like this one this has a four and a half inch diamond wheel on it this is a makita with a pearl p4 blade on it and i have a seven inch tile saw i love my little seven inch tile saws because they're really light and if you're a di wire they're much more affordable and you can do almost everything that a big ten inch saw can do maybe just not as fast so let's get started okay the first thing we need to do is make the mark where the drop here is coming out of the wall and this is what the shower head connects to right you got the shower arm and it just screws right into this half inch drop here that's our typical setup so wherever this is coming out of the wall we take our measurement and then we transfer it onto our tile so i'm just going to take an arbitrary measurement i'm going to go six inches here and five and three quarters here again this is arbitrary it's going to depend again on wherever this is coming out in the wall what i like to do is give myself a nice line with my speed square so now that i got my mark i'm gonna make a square that's one inch by one inch because this guy here is three quarters and again we have some wiggle room so i'm going to give myself an inch that's also going to allow us to over cut a little bit if we accidentally do that so i'm going to go ahead and transfer half inch on either side to give myself a one inch square thing i'm going to do is make my marks and i'm going to transfer these marks to the side of the tile as well i'll show you why i'm going to do that in a second but basically i'm going to be transferring this mark to the back of the tile again these speed squares are really handy they're going to make it a lot easier so you can see i've transferred the line to the other side so now that i have the marks on the edge of the tile i can transfer them onto the back i'm going to do that do that on both marks that i have now i'm going to switch to a sharpie because it's going to show up a little better on this textured pile so now what i have is i have the same square marked here as on the front of the tile that's in the exact same place it's pretty obvious since this is a circular wheel we're going to have to make a bigger cut on the back to transfer it through to the front so i'm going to go ahead and start cutting and i'm just going to cut a little bit past the line i'm going to try to stay evenly spaced on either side of the line obviously i don't want to cut weight on here up here i'm just going to cut straight down through this put my earplugs in okay so what i did is i just cut down just enough to where i could see the blade come through and i can see down through here that the blade has come through the front once i saw that i stopped what i was doing and now you can see i have it coming through the front and so i'm just going to do this for the other three sides [Music] so and you can see i kept checking as i went you i kept pulling the blade out so i could look down in there and see because look it came through on the front now this is okay if it's it's not through very much you can see i'm only i'm only about halfway through there that's okay i'm gonna stop right there and make my other cuts so you can see here i've made my cuts on the back and they've come through the front and even though they're not all the way through on the front that's okay i just i really don't want to go past if i go past a little bit it's okay but really you don't have much room once you see it start to come through on the front you need to stop now that i have that i can just take my chisel and just pop it just like that and that little guy is going to come out again i have a a few little tidbits on the side which could be cleaned up with the chisel and we have the cut we need so we got plenty of wiggle room in here we got plenty of wiggle room this is going to come in here and again our escutcheon is going to cover wherever it needs to go you have that nice beautiful cut so it doesn't have to be a circle it doesn't have to be pretty that's all you need now what if you only have a wet saw and not a grinder well that's okay i'm going to show you how to do it on a wet saw so all you need to do is do the exact same marks on the front and back that we did with the grinder cut so let's go over the tile saw and let's make this cut now what i have here is a little ruby seven inch tile saw again i really like the seven inch saws ridgid has a nice one to me they're really versatile lightweight easy to move around and making small cuts like this is a little bit easier so i'm just going to move the tray out of the way and i'm going to use this wheel pretty much the same is how i used the the grinder but what i'm going to do differently here is i'm actually going to be using my finger on the back to feel for when that blade pops through because it's it's really hard to see and feel without that i just don't i just don't want to go too far so i'm going to be using my finger underneath and don't worry this blade if it's wet it's not going to hurt you and you can touch it with your finger [Applause] okay so you can see i went a little too far here it's it's really tricky even though i was i was feeling for that my finger must have been just a little bit off because i didn't feel it come right through i got three sides really good but this last one i kind of goofed up so let's see if this still covers it might still cover that because we have quite a bit of play in this escutcheon that it's still going to work it's still going to completely cover so that's how much wiggle room we have and now all of these escutcheons might not be this generous if they're a little bit smaller i would have uh burned up this whole tile and had to make a new one but you can see it can be done on a wet saw okay so you can see both of these methods worked both the wet saw and the four and a half inch grinder but obviously this four and a half inch grinder i was able to be a lot more accurate and it looks nicer even though no one's never going to see it because this is covering up you know it looks nicer so if you don't have one of these four and a half inch makitas i highly suggest get one even if you're not doing tile all the time you can put a cut off wheel on it to cut metal and stuff like that do some grinding but this is a really really nice tool to have when you're doing tile i would say the main things you need to get started if you're doing tile you need a tile saw like maybe that seven inch saw need a four and a half inch grinder you need a drill to mix your thinset and then obviously the small hand tools trowels notch trowels margin trials and stuff like that but this grinder is part of the arsenal that will really help you out so there you have it if you like this video maybe go to tilecoach.com and check out some of the merchandise we have by you going there and purchasing items it helps me make these videos i'm not sponsored by any manufacturers so if you want to show some love go over to tilecoach.com and get one of these metal t-shirts or i have a few other items on there as well hats and a couple other shirts and before i go it's christmas time i'd like to leave you with uh maybe a message of gratitude i am so grateful and thankful for all of you who watch my videos my cup is overfilling with gratitude and that's not too easy to say in these times i know the last year and a half two years has been really difficult with the lockdown no matter what side you're on it's been divisive it's hard we've lost a lot of faith and hope in humanity and if you're struggling right now that's probably normal don't be too hard on yourself if you haven't been as productive at work if you haven't you know maybe you're a diy-er and you're your bathroom's been sitting like this for six months and you're struggling and just can't find the energy and motivation hang in there man everybody's kind of in the same boat i'm struggling with some of that stuff too so just know that we're all in the same boat if we can kind of just unify give each other a little bit of grace know that not everybody's at their best and just try to be a positive influence in whatever small way you can and again i'm so grateful for you watching these videos and i love you i love being your tile coach and we'll see you on the next video

Channel: TileCoach

Views: 64,337

Keywords: shower head, how to, cut hole in tile, cutting a hole in tile, cut hole in ceramic tile, making a hole in tile, how to make a hole in tile, how to drill a hole in tile, drill a hole in ceramic tile, shower tile, cut hole in tile for shower head, shower head holes

Id: Jk170Fua3k0

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021