Hello again. Last week I asked for advice on cutting marble with/without water. Many of you were kind enough to respond, with the general consensus that wet cutting was my best option. You were right. I started the floor tiles - 600mm sq, 20mm thick - with a 115mm grinder and "fan edged" Sankyo blade, labelled as specifically recommended for marble. The dust WAS awful, but I was expecting that. The bigger problem was the chipped cut edges. I tried everything; taping the cut line before cutting, (waste of time), cutting the tiles upside down, cutting just a couple of mm deep through the surface and then turning the tile over to cut through the back... Nothing really worked. To be fair, the Sankyo blade was pretty fast, just not clean enough. I actually got slightly better results with an old Norton continuous smooth rim blade, which kinda made me question the "Turbo Fan Edge" design. Unfortunately it was a "patch -in" job; most of the walls had already been tiled, so my cut edges were painfully visible. You've all seen worse, and I just about got away with it, but never again. That evening I paid £150 for a Rubi 180 BL wet table cutter. As pro tools go this is a very budget conscious model, but the difference in use was gob smacking. Slower than the grinder maybe, but by the time I'd given the cut edge a quick tile-file it was hard to tell from the factory edge. For what it's worth, with this machine I actually did get a slightly cleaner edge cutting the tiles upside down; I don't know if this is common practice. I used the blade supplied with the cutter, which was labelled as designed for ceramics, so perhaps a different blade would have given even better results. My thanks to all of you who responded to my original post, and I hope this update isn't too long. Cheers guys, Simon.
