Max contrast with LPL colour head

Last night was my first night in a darkroom for 13 years. Just proofed some negs and did a couple of enlargements onto RC, just getting back into the saddle really. For the first time I purchased a set of Ilford MC filters to use for burning in shadow areas. One print, of a forest on a foggy day, still didn't have enough contrast with 170M (the max filtration on my enlarger) So I printed through MC filters as an experiment and found that 170M on the LPL matched the grade 4 filter. I was surprised with this as I always thought colour heads went a bit higher in contrast than this.

mark

This has been my experience also with Magenta Yellow systems. I get stronger contrast with my blue green enlarger.
I have never looked at the other end of things. I wonder if 00 is off on colour heads?

You might want to make sure that at the M 170cc setting the magenta is completely covering the orifice and the yellow is completely out of the way at Y 0cc setting.

A while back I tested all 4 of my color heads against a #5 Ilford filter and all 5 were nearly the same (as near as one could tell with a 21 step wedge).

If you have a look through the Ilford literature, there is a PDF on basic printing. In this PDF, there is a table of what contrast you should achieve from a colour head. Without looking at the document now, I am pretty sure it suggests around grade 4.5 for an LPL. Obviously, there is going to be some variation, so to me, 4 is not too far off the mark.

EDIT - this is the document I was thinking of
http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/200629187211322.pdf

According to this, 4 1/2 is around 140M. 170 wouldn't get you 5, though