How to cut deep textured porcelain tile with a manual tile cutter

Is it possible to cut high textured porcelain tiles with a manual tile cutter?

Well, it mostly depends on the type of texture and on the tile cutter that you own.

Standard porcelain tiles are normally flat and smooth. This kind of finishing is ideal for the proper spinning of the incision wheel on a manual tile cutter.

A completely different scenario is presented when talking about textured porcelain tiles. These kind of tiles have a rough texture, created mostly for decorative reasons. The variability of textures is very high, from holes and waves to bubbles and deep ribs.

Cutting textured porcelain tiles is not always easy, the hardness of the material and the heavy texture sometimes are not allowing a complete and constant incision and consequently a good result.

How to cut textured porcelain tiles

If the shape/design of the texture is not very deep, a good technique to cut the tile is to repeat the incision more than one time in order to create deep and complete incision.

Sometimes the texture is so deep and complex that the cutting wheel isn’t able to make the incision. In these situations we recommend to try to cut the tile face down (making the incision on the back of the tile).

The video shows this technique applied to a very popular textured tile sold in the UK market. The only way to cut the tile was face down with the consecutive deep and powerful incision.

For cutting that specific porcelain tile named Stratus, we used a Masterpiuma tile cutter because the incision handle of this cutter is spring loaded and this unique feature allows the wheel to follow the shape of textured tiles.

However, to properly split these kind of tiles we recommend to use a wet tile saw with a proper diamond blade instead of a manual snap cutter.

A wet tile saw will be able to cut any texture giving you a perfect edge finishing.

For a full product demo about this cutter please click here: snap cutter for textured tiles.