"Ben" wrote in message
om...
Hi all,

I'm currently tiling my bathroom with 8x10inch ceramic tiles. I'm a
tiling virgin so I thought I'd make life easier by investing in an
electric tile cutter - and to be honest it's the worst £30 I ever
spent.

I can't for the life of me seem to be able to cut the tiles straight
and true. All I want to do is cut about 15mm from the edge of the
tile. Out of the eight I've put on the wall I've had 5 rejects - and
I'm only happy with the 8 so called successes coz I think I can loose
the cut edges in the corner with grout. On average I'm getting around
a 5mm wander in the cut.

I'm using the plastic guide thing that clips in and using the guide
along the bottom to set the width. Then I push the tile through as
slowly as I can with even pressure from behind. I thought about
putting a line down the tile where I want the cut and trying to guide
the tile with that. But this turned out to be useless as the line gets
covered by red muddy stuff from the tile which gets mixed in with the
water and thrown about by the blade.

I was very suprised to find nobody who is complaining about the same
problems. In fact most people seemt to think they are the best thing
since sliced bread.
If anyone has any ideas why I'm so rubbish at using this thing then
I'd be very grateful for the advice.

Cheers,
Ben

As with the others here I've had a very good experience with this cuter,
having recently tiled a porch and the bathroom.

The guide needs to be set up carefully to ensure that is set parallel to the
blade, the additional markings on the surface of he machine are good for a
guide.

the small bracket holding the splash guard is pretty flimsy and you need to
ensure that it is correctly aligned with the blade so that the tiles can
pass by it easily.... I took the first one I bought back to B&Q for
replacement before I even used it because the bracket was so bent.

I've managed fine cutting cutting straight lines without the guide as
well... (the tiles were 600mm long) I marked a cutting line in pencil and
took care to line the tile up square with the blade by eye. I didn't use
excessive amounts of water in eth reservoir so that I got a better view of
the cutting line, but do keep topping up the water in this case to ensure
that the wheel stays wet.

I also had to make several cuts similar to yours.. taking off 5 or 10mm
along a 600mm length. In this case the the plastic guide was very useful.
but I also found it useful to have the line marked in pencil as well. I
generally operated with teh splash guard raised 10-15mm above tile, which
while making considerably more mess did allow me to see the pencil cuting
line as a check.

good luck

David