The bare nichrome wire was what we used most of the time. The engines came with igniters that had a thin coating of some blue-colored stuff on the middle third - not at all like the thick black pyrogen on today's Solar igniters. They were straight and we had to bend them into the "V" shape before inserting them. Maybe these became known as the Astron igniters; I don't know. At the time, they didn't have a name; they were just called igniters. The thin blue stuff was almost like paint, or thin wire insulation, and it followed the curve of the wire without cracking or chipping off when we bent them. I remember that we needed to scrape it with a knife blade to get any of it off the igniter. (I don't remember now why, but we tried to do that once.) When we used the bare nichrome, we would make a complete turn in the middle section around the tip of a pencil or pen, just like it was shown in the catalog, so that the igniter had a tiny coil right at the tip. We used tiny wads of recovery wadding as plugs to hold them in the engine nozzles, or else a strip of tape across the nozzle.
The Electro-Launch provided just enough current to fire the engine if the batteries were fresh. The main culprit there wasn't the pad or controller, though; it was the quality of the batteries at the time. I don't know when alkalines came on the market (I think it was the early '70's), but in 1967 and '68 all we had were the old carbon-zinc kind. They didn't have much reserve and they were depleted astoundingly fast by today's standards. (They had something like one-tenth of the useful life of a comparable modern alkaline battery.
And they leaked! 
) On a 13 year old's allowance of $1 a week (plus whatever I could make mowing lawns), it would take me almost a month to save up the money to buy 4 carbon-zinc D cells. The EL was supposed to use photoflash batteries, which were heavy-duty carbon-zinc cells, I think, but at nearly twice the price, they were out of the question for me.
So I nursed my batteries along, trying to squeeze as much life out of them as I could. I can well remember sitting at our little launch site, holding my Electro-Launch controller, and listening to my friend do the countdown from 10. As soon as he said "10," I would press the launch button and hold it down. If we were lucky, by the time he reached "0" the engine would ignite. If it didn't, he would immediately cycle through the countdown again as I continued to press the button. If it didn't ignite after 3 countdowns or so, we would abort, wait the recommended time, and check the rocket. Sometimes the problem was a misplaced igniter, and sometimes it was a disconnected or shorted clip. But many times it was neither.
My friend would usually bring along some Jetex wick and a few strike-anywhere matches, just in case.
We talked about using a 12-volt system instead, but the problem was obtaining a 12v battery and transporting it to our launch site on our bikes. (No RC batteries back then!) Using the battery in Dad's car was completely out of the question, for obvious reasons. Later on, I was seriously considering getting the extra battery pack for the Electro-Launch in order to turn it into a 12 volt system, and I probably would have if I had stayed active in the hobby and had been able to hang onto the pad.
I wasn't until I became a BAR and started launching rockets with my Electron Beam launcher that I experienced nearly instant ignition of a rocket motor when I pressed the launch button. It startled me the first time that I did it, because I wasn't expecting such a quick response. And it wasn't until I started using my present 12 volt system that I began to consistently see igniters with the bridge wire completely vaporized.
MarkII