Tool Review: Husky Wet Saw & Other Tiling Tools

This is our wet saw. It’s the Husky THD 950L 7″ Tile/Stone Wet Saw to be exact, and it cost about $300. If we only had one bathroom to tile, we wouldn’t have spent that much money on a wet saw. But, we have two bathrooms to tile and my parents also have two bathrooms to tile, so we split the cost and now have a family wet saw that will be passed down for generations to come.

Here it is in action:

Overall, we really like this saw and I would recommend buying one if you have quite a bit of tiling in your future. It’s easy to use, rotates to a 45 degree angle to cut mitered corners in your tile and holds up well to lots and lots of cutting.

Here’s what we didn’t like: it’s loud (wear ear protection), sprays water (but that’s to be expected) and the rollers on the sliding table that you put the tile on sometimes get a little stuck. However, the manufacturer does supply you with a bottle of oil to remedy the sticking. Also, this thing is a pain to clean.

I found it especially annoying that the manufacturer had to put its logo on the water pan, which became encased in goopy tile muck that I had to carve out from around the letters H-U-S-K-Y and of course, the little Husky dog head. That poor dog will forever have an eye that’s filled with dried-out tile muck.

Here’s another tool that’s indispensable when tiling:

A nippers. We used our nippers to cut all our circular or curved cuts. You can buy drill attachments to cut circular holes in your tiles, and if you read on, you’ll find out why we had to rely on nippers instead. To make a curved cut, we scored the tile with the wet saw and then chopped through the scored part with the nippers following the shape of the curve we needed.

Here are a few miscellaneous tile accouterments that were not useful to us:

We bought this because we over applied the mortar for the floor tiles, causing it to spoog out from between the tiles. We hoped this little guy would remove the excess mortar, but it’s mortar-removing-tip didn’t fit between our tiles.

We purchased this to cut holes in our tile for the pipes and shower faucet. Our tiles are made of porcelain. The package says this thing cuts through porcelain. Nope. It doesn’t. Not even a little bit.

Here’s an item that is necessary, but very frustrating:

These are spacers. They’re used to keep even amounts of space between all your tiles.

Like this:

These things did their job and kept 1/8″ space between all of our tiles. At least when they stayed in place that’s what they did. However, our spacers kept falling out from between our tiles. We wondered if the little rubber spacers you can get would be less top heavy and therefore stay in place better.

So, there you have it. The good and the bad of tiling tools.

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