Print head too far away from bed

Hello all,

I am having some problems with my Prusa i3 printer.

Firstly:

When I set the end stop on the z axis and level the bed using pronterface the first layer is printing about 1.5mm away from the bed. My process for getting the bed level and at the right height is as follows:

Screw all corner fixings on bed down and set the z-axis just above the face of the bed.
Starting in one corner and working my way around the bed in a counter-clockwise manner I unscrew the corner fixings until the bed is a paper thickness away from the head.
I repeat the above steps until it is level in all four corners.

When I then use pronterface to start my print the first layer starts printing 1.5mm (Approximately) above the bed?

I have tried setting the offset in slic3r to compensate for this but it doesn't make a difference.

Has anyone else experienced this and if so how did you fix it please?

Secondly:

When the head starts heating up the filament starts ozzing from the end. Am I setting my temperature too high? I'm using 1.75mm PLA @190°C

Thanks.

Pause while you are printing and ask the printer exactly where it thinks it is with 'M114', and see if it makes sense.

You should be able to adjust things by moving the z stop, adjusting the firmware config, offsetting things in slic3r, or offsetting in Pronterface during the run with a 'g92 z1.5', depending on how permanent you want the changes to be.

Thanks for the swift reply.

I played around with it a little more last night and reset the bed and realised that the x-axis wasn't level with the bed. I'm still unsure how this resulted in the problem above but it was looking good until a repair I had made to the print head failed and I had to abort the print.

With regards to the g-code commands can you just manually enter this in the console on the right side of pronterface?

Thanks.

Yes - G code can be entered into pronterface on the lower right side of the screen