We’ve been discussing our tips and lessons learned while tiling our kitchen but I also wanted to take a few minutes to share some specific details about how to use a tile saw. So we thought we would capture them all in one place for anyone that is interested in the future.

For a refresher, this is the tile saw we bought. It was around $80 from Harbor Freight, including buying the blade. That’s not an affiliate link or anything, just sharing the info in case you’re curious.

Safety Tips:

1. Wear gloves. The very first cut, I wasn’t wearing any, and the chips from the tile got on my hand. As I was wiping the off, one wedged into my thumb, and I had to pull it out and get a band-aid to avoid getting bright red blood all over our nice white tiles.

2. Wear long sleeves. If tile shards and slivers can get embedded in your hands, they can also get embedded in your arms.

3. Wear eye and face protection. It’s always a must to wear eye protection, especially with the tile saw kicking up tile chips while you are cutting with the guard partially up. The face protection follows the same reasoning as the gloves. No one wants tile splinters in their eyes and face.

4. The tile saw tends to spray a stream of water at you. If you have a rubber apron, that would be a nice addition to keep your clothes from getting wet or tile chips on it. I didn’t have one, so I had a wet stripe from my neck to my crotch.

5. When figuring out how to use a tile saw, you need to make sure to create a “drip loop” in your power cord. This is very important to keep water out of the plug and the extension cord. Basically you need to have a low spot between the saw and the end of the power cord. Any water that accidentally runs down the power cord will stop at the drip loop and not get into your plug-in.

We used our retractable extension cord for this, which worked perfectly, but you could also just drape the cord over a ladder or something else to create a loop.

Working tips:

1. If you don’t buy a grease pencil to mark your lines, masking tape works better than a graphite pencil. The water washes the graphite right away, but the tape holds up long enough to make the cuts.

2. If you are cutting multiple thin pieces out of one tile, you can use this trick:

Using the fence of the tile saw, make your cut while leaving a short amount uncut. Then flip the tile over and make the second cut. Your tile will be in a fat “S” shape, but this gives you something extra to hold on to on either side of the blade. after the second cut, go back and free-hand the small remaining cut. It will give you smoother, safer, straight lines.

(P.S. This photo shows how wet my shirt got without an apron.)

3. To take this a step further, for finishing the tile cuts, instead of cutting through all of the way on the first pass, go most of the way and then flip the tile 180 degrees and finish the cut from the other side. This will help minimize tear out.

Tear out is when you get to the end of the tile, and the remaining uncut portion becomes weak and breaks off under the pressure of cutting, giving you a bad edge, like this:

4. Refill the water basin of the tile saw regularly. Tile saws lose water as they cut, so it is good to replace what is lost and keep the blade cool.

5. Remove any debris that rest against the blade. This will do a couple of things. One, it will keep the saw from having any unnecessary friction (causing it to heat up). Plus, if there are tile shards resting against the cutting edge, it could dull your blade. 

6. If you are using the fence, cut all similar pieces at the same time. This will cut down the tile saw setup time as you work on all of the special cuts.

Let us know if any of these save you, or if there were any tips we missed that could have saved us when we were figuring out how to use a tile saw for the first time.