In MAKE Magazine, Stefan Jones did a great pictorial article on LPR igniter making. http://makezine.com/projects/model-rocket-igniters/ From http://jacobs-online.biz/nichrome_wire.htm You can buy 100 feet of 30 or 32 gauge nichrome wire for $6.00! 30 gauge is a bit thicker than 32 gauge. If cut into 2 1/2" long pieces, 100' of nichrome could make 480 igniters! 0.0125 cents each before a laquer dip! On TRF Fred Shector gave this advice: For a lantern battery (alkaline) use 32 ga nichrome and form a loop (see attachement).For a car battery, you can use as thick as 30 ga, but anything like 30, 31 or 32 ga is fine. Again, form a loop. Roy Green added this: 32 awg bare nichrome is what Estes used to sell back in the day. For their Astron igniters, they would use 30 AWG, shave it or smash it at points along the way to increase resistance at those points, and coat the shaved points with a mild pyrogen of sorts (actually an insulator with a low ignition point).
