With quite a bit of tiling to do (bathroom and downstairs WC), I recently I
bought an electric tile cutter from Screwfix - item 13192. [I got this
rather than one of the others because we (probably) need to mitre swallows
and the extra cutting capacity would help with that.]

Today I got it out and started cutting.

The machine was quieter than I expected and appeared to work well. However,
when I actually looked at the tiles that I had cut and wiped off the crud,
the glaze along the cut edge was badly chipped. I had noticed a bit of
juddering as I cut - so it wasn't a total surprise.

Trying to work out what was wrong I tried the following:

Cut three different types of tile;
Cut glaze up and glaze down;
Fed the tile extremely slowly (I doubt that I could actually achieve any
slower by hand);
Laid the tile on a piece of plasterboard (so that its top surface was
closer to the top of the cutting blade);
Used an excess of water;
Checked the blade - seemed totally secure and straight.

Reading the archives, I did find a few mentions of chipped glaze, but I
didn't see any definite solutions. If I cannot improve the results I shall
be looking at returning the cutter. It's difficult to believe that so many
of you have posted such positive experiences if you had the same problems.
So I assume that something is different in what I am doing.

The best results were obtained on a 4", fairly thick tile. The worst on a
6" tile. I reckon that on the 6", the glaze is much harder than the body.
All are fairly ordinary glazed wall tiles. The tile bodies all seemed to
cut fairly cleanly.

There seem to be four possible problems:
The tiles;
The machine;
The blade;
Me.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Rod

http://www.screwfix.com/app/sfd/cat/pro.jsp?ts=85876&id=13192