Pay phone charm

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.