How to cut rigid vinyl plank flooring?

Knowing how to make the right cuts is a key to a successful install, I'm gonna show you how to make all the cuts that you will need to get it right, and the tools that you need to do it from DIY to probe those go ahead and jump into the cuts and the ones that I am going to show you are cutting to length, cutting the width, doing notches on corners on sides, cutting curves, and cutting holes, and that's everything that you are going to need for your successful install, the cut that you're gonna be making them most is cutting a plankton length, and that's because at the end of every road you are going to have a little spot that is going to be. Smaller than a full life play, so an easy way to do that is to go ahead and use a tape measure. You can go and look at there i've got 13 and 3/4 here, but remember look at the manufacturers recommendations for gap that you need for expansion this one says a quarter inch, so i'd go 13 and 1/2 versus thirteen three quarters, so I can easily measure that and mark that, but there's an easier way to do that, I'm just gonna take the plank and put it in the orientation that I am going to have it installed and then flip it around. Gin for end now what I can do is put it up against my wall, then I'm gonna back it off a quarter inch.

And sure for that expansion joint now all I have to do is mark right where the underlying plank is. And that's my cupboard now the most basic way to make the cut is just with a utility knife or a box cutter, so i've got this marked and now I can use a straight edge. I have a carpenter's square here, a 6 inch carpenter's square is gonna be too small for this specific piece because it's 8 inches somebody use a 12 inch one. Back in line, the carpenter's square up on my mark when you're holding this, you want to hold it at the top so that the carpenter's square will not slip on you, but the other important thing is make sure you're not cutting right on top of the floor and you just installed, but I like to do is take a little off cut and you can put that underneath it. In that way, when you're scoring your line. The razor blades going to come off and it's going to hit the scrap and it's not going to hit your brand new floor in mess it up. 

And sure for that expansion joint now all I have to do is mark right where the underlying plank is. And that's my cupboard now the most basic way to make the cut is just with a utility knife or a box cutter, so i've got this marked and now I can use a straight edge. I have a carpenter's square here, a 6 inch carpenter's square is gonna be too small for this specific piece because it's 8 inches somebody use a 12 inch one. Back in line, the carpenter's square up on my mark when you're holding this, you want to hold it at the top so that the carpenter's square will not slip on you, but the other important thing is make sure you're not cutting right on top of the floor and you just installed, but I like to do is take a little off cut and you can put that underneath it. In that way, when you're scoring your line. The razor blades going to come off and it's going to hit the scrap and it's not going to hit your brand new floor in mess it up.

Don't go back over because if you go back over it it could stray in it, you're gonna have a cut that's not as nice if you use a tapping block that is a great thing to get leverage with so I can feel underneath I can feel the scoreline, I'm going to put the tapping block right across there and just gives it support across that brake line, put some pressure on it and now I can just pull up. It breaks right along that line, so it's a nice clean snap, sometimes you'll have this and it will stay attached and you just can score that with the razor blade as well, but now I can flip it back around. And it fits right in place that peace was about 13 inches, so I had a nice leverage to be able to pull up, let's say that I had just a four inch piece to make, so if I had a little four inch line here and the problem is as it gets smaller, it gets harder to break.

Because now i've only got this if the piece is longer, i've got a nice little arm lever arm to pull up on it, but on this little piece and will try to break this. I can't quite do it because I need a little bit longer there the way that i've done this in the past i've used a miter saw, miter saw is working great for this, they are very messy, though, but you could use a circular saw, you can use a handsaw, you could use a jigsaw you can use a lot of different methods to do this. But there is one different technique that you can use, a laminate tile cutter, and I'm going to show you one that I got I bought it off Amazon for about 100 bucks I haven't leaned down below in the description to it, as well as all the other tools that I am using here and so this is a 13 inch siding and laminate cutter and basically it's just got a big long lever arm that is attached to a blade. You put the piece in and you just chop it down, just getting style and it will come right off.

Beauty of this is that you can go as small of a cut as you want, but what i've noticed is it does leave the backing attached most of the time, but you look at that stuff like a three quarter inch cut there and then all you have to do is separate that backing. With your razor blade and then you have it when we compare this cut that I just made right here you can see this nice super crisp clean line versus this one that I made with the snapping in, especially on the back, you can see it's kind of all tore up here, it's a little bit jagged. Not a huge big deal because most this is gonna be covered, but you definitely do get a cleaner line when you're using the vinyl plank uttered another cool thing about this cutter is that if you have angled cuts, it makes those pretty easy as well. So it could be something to consider if you have a really big job to do, or if you're gonna be doing a lot of jobs on your own.

And family or different rooms in your house and the next cut is cutting planks to width, I am not going to have to do this very often, you probably have to do it at the beginning of the install and the end, and then if you have any jets out in the room, you might have to do that as well, so what we need to do is cut the board down the length and so this one you can't really do that with a box cutter, and the reason is what I showed earlier is the leverage so we could score a line, but then snapping it would be very difficult. And I tried that and it didn't go so well now you can use a handsaw, something like this that comes with a miter box or any other type of hand saw, but I don't think that that's really great option because the teeth are really fine and if you can see what I am doing here and you're cutting, it's gonna take a really long time, especially if you have a long wall that you're doing this for and have to cut three or four planks. It's gonna take you a while to do so if you have a really tight budget you can use a handsaw, but I am much better option is to use a circular saw or a jigsaw this is a cordless model here.

This will work fine as well, and really you can use any blade so you don't have to worry about any of that one thing that I like to do is get it out of the room you're installing, answer you're not making all that dust, I like to come down to my workshop and do it, or you could set it up outside as well, I also used a piece of one inch rigid foam insulation as a backer, so that way I can put it on my bench here and not worry about cutting into the bench and when you put this in place you do want to clamp it down so it's not going to move, and also you want to make sure that the blade is set to just a bit below the thickness of. The actual piece there, so you don't need to have a lot of the blade exposed to do this. And this is going to make a mess like I said, but it's gonna be a really clean cut, so using a circular saw of your grade, you can get an inexpensive model of a circular saw for about 50 bucks, another great way to do it is to use a jigsaw now this is what we used it at, my brother in law's house when we were there, because he didn't have a circular saw on hand, now you can get an inexpensive jigsaw for about 40 bucks and you can also use that for some of the other cuts I'm going to tell you about in a minute. And the downside of a jigsaw is that if you're cutting the length of it is a lot slower, especially if you do not have one where you can adjust the orbital action on the jigsaw.

But it does do a great job of making that cut, so jigsaw is a great alternative if you've already got one of those, and you don't want to invest in a circular saw. So the next step that we're going to talk about is cutting notches on the corners of planks and basically you'll have to do this anytime you have a bump out anywhere in your room now i've had to do this around cabinetry, I am also had the song corner walls that stick out, so unless your room is just a complete rectangle, you'll probably have to do this, okay, so if we've laid a row, we're up against our wall and we have a little bump out here, then all we are going to have to do is we're going to cut our first piece to length, I'm going to flip it around. And I'm gonna go all the way to the wall don't go against the bumps out or you'll cut it too short, so I'm gonna go against the wall, pull it back a quarter of an inch. Make my mark. I bought the vinyl cutter up here, I'm just going to line it up on my mark cut this the length. So now I can put it in place and you need to mark the length of it as well as the width of the notch, so I am going to line it straight up with the end where it's going to get installed.