Pay phone charm

Craft & Design
Pay phone charm

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Just in time for every prankster’s favorite holiday, Alex Schlegel made these chained up gems attached to this payphone, much like a giant Asian schoolgirl’s cell phone charm:

I designed the faceted gems in Solidworks, printed out templates for each face using images I made in MATLAB, cut out each face from 18g. mild steel sheet on a hydraulic shear, brazed all the pieces together with brass brazing rod and an oxyacetylene torch, cleaned up the edges with a 4″ grinder, and then brazed them together with chain. I could only find zinc-plated chain so I burned off all the plating with the torch, which is probably not too advisable considering zinc fumes are bad and can give one something called “zinc flu”. Finally I rusted the whole getup with a ferric nitrate solution I prepared by dissolving steel wool in nitric acid. I secured the charm to the pay phone with a padlock for safekeeping.

2 thoughts on “Pay phone charm

  1. Tim says:

    Hey! those are on mill ave. at ASU! I totally saw those today and wondered where they came from! good show!

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Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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