There is no evidence in the rules to support any specific interpretation of what this metal rod attunement could mean. We could extrapolate from the magical item attunement rules, which may or not be correct and would certainly be confusing. I won't do that here because the answer to this question doesn't rely on that -- it's simply one interpretation of how the end result of "planar attunement" could be achieved.
Attunement in rules terms applies specifically to magic items. Rules for attuning a magic item can be found in Chapter 7 of the DMG. Normally, a magic item is attuned to the user of the item and in order to attune the item, the user essentially meditates on the item for the length of a short rest (after having already discerned the magical properties of said item during a previous short rest or through other means). This doesn't really help us determine how a forked metal rod can become attuned to a plane. We might use this to help inform our opinion on how an item might become attuned and what attuned means in terms of magic in D&D 5e but it doesn't give us something concrete we can use to answer the question.
This spell, in particular, requires DM intervention to use correctly because we don't have rules for attuning magic items to a location or a plane. Maybe planar shift tuning forks are readily accessible from Ye Olde Magick Shoppe or perhaps one and only one exists for each plane in your particular planar model in your particular setting. There is no specific answer that can be applied to this question.
This is the only real answer I can give at this time, as this needs to be worked out with your DM and is subject to a great degree of DM interpretation. If, in your game, the DM decides this is something that is possible then perhaps the PC could take the course of action outlined in your question. The important part is that the DM is involved and is able to make a ruling on this before the PC's plans play out in game and blindside the DM, causing him or her to make a possibly uninformed ruling on the spot (which is, I assume, why you're asking here in the first place :).
The fact is, the rules make no mention at all of how this is done. You could point to previous editions of the game to infer that it means the tuning fork/metal rod is made of a specific metal which attunes it to a specific plane, or that it was crafted to produce a specific note which is associated with a specific plane.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help anyone new to D&D who doesn't have a 40+ year-spanning historical knowledge of the game and 40+ years experience playing the game to figure out how the heck this is supposed to work, and it's not fair to assume it works the same way at all, since that puts new groups and new generations of players at a disadvantage. This leads to situations where you, as a new DM or player, decide with your group that it works in a certain way (because it's left undefined and that's what you should do), then when you go to a new table with some experienced, long-time players you are told "It should work this way because of [history lesson]." How could you have known? You just bought the books last week and have never played before.