There are guns, there are badass guns, and then there’s an instrument of death fashioned from a 4.5-billion-year-old Gibson meteorite. If you’re well-heeled enough to carry around a pair of the world’s only “extra-terrestrial pistols”, then even if you couldn’t hit the broadside of the Normandy SR-2 with a mass accelerator weapon, we’re going to err on the safe side and assume you can afford hitmen with money-back guarantees we’ll never be found.
Safe to say, no one will ever again question Cabot Guns’ regard as the “Rolls Royce of firearms, thanks to these twin 1911 handguns. Founder Rob Bianchin announced in 2015 that he intended to break historic ground in his craft by fashioning a couple of pistols from the rarest metal on Earth, hunks of Gibson discovered in the 1830’s in Namibia. Having previously crafted meteorite grips, it wasn’t an entirely alien (pun intended) concept, but two whole guns? This was a different animal entirely. His band of elite gun makers poured five months of unexpectedly challenging labor into cutting individual pieces from the meteorite and assembling them, knowing that one botched cut meant one of the most obscenely costly “my bad” moments in human history.
Cabot Guns even built an initial stainless-steel model to test pioneering production techniques custom-tailored to a material never used before and likely to never be used again. Head engineer Mike Hebor, a right-handed shooter by nature, had the privilege of examining the finished product hands-on.
“I shot one freehand,” he said. “I held the gun with my left hand, with my right hand behind my back—you know, just in case.”
Nevertheless, here we are – the “Big Bang Pistol Set” is a reality, thanks to extensive 3-D modeling, X-rays, EDM wire cutting, electron-beam welding, and every craftsman’s understanding that they were creating guns worth more than the next two generations of their families. The frame, trigger, slide, grip, and magazine release of each gun is certified pure Gibson. In fact, Cabot Guns only looked elsewhere for non-Gibson materials when it came to the sears, springs, barrels, pins, screws, slide rails, and hammer struts.
Cabot Guns accentuated the Gibeon’s natural Widmanstätten crystalline pattern with acid etching to emphasize the iron meteorite’s trademark splendor, also selectively leaving the outer-surface “bark” of the meteorite metal visible where possible on such components as the trigger.
One collector is already rumored to have offered Cabot Guns $1 million for The Big Bang Pistol Set, roughly what CNN has estimated the singular masterpieces could fetch at auction. No dice, however. Cabot has set the bidding to open at a history-making $4.5 million later this year.
Source – OddityCentral via RobbReport via Cabot Guns
