The Ultimate Gun Gift: A 1911 Made from Meteorite Metal
OutdoorHub Reporters 12.18.15
Looking for a gift for the gun owner who already has everything? Cabot Guns announced on Wednesday that it is currently working on producing a pair of 1911 pistols made with material acquired from the famous Gibeon meteor.
Cabot Guns has a reputation for producing premium, high-end 1911 pistols and previously produced guns with meteorite pistol grips. However, this time the company says it will be crafting the entire firearm from meteorite metal, making it possibly the first handgun to be made from such materials.
“Earlier this year, Cabot acquired a 35 kg portion of the prized Gibeon meteor which met the size characteristics for the project from famed meteor hunter and expert Robert Haag,” the company stated in a press release. “The meteor, dated to an age of 4.5 billion years, was first discovered in the sub-Saharan part of Africa now known as Namibia in 1838. It is believed to have landed on Earth during pre-historic times. Not only is the age and metallurgical composition of the Gibeon meteor fantastical, it is considered the Cadillac of meteors in large part because of the aesthetic Widmanstattten pattern exhibited but the meteorites grain pattern once acid etched. Tiny portions of the valuable Gibeon meteor has been used by jewelers such as Rolex, but the scale and complexity of the pistols is ambitious.”
Ambitious may be an understatement. The metal found in the meteorite is hardly ideal for constructing a working firearm, so Cabot must first design a process to integrate the meteorite with more traditional materials. Cabot has not yet detailed the process that will go into turning the hunk of space rock into a 1911, but the company said that it is looking into several advanced techniques that will work around the material’s technical limitations.
“To merely cut the meteorite, a three-dimensional laser scan of the meteorite was created to plan the cuts required to make each component of the pistols in a process analogous to cutting a rare diamond,” the company stated.
Cabot is set to appear at next year’s SHOT Show in Las Vegas, where it will display several components already cut from the meteorite and offer more information on how the pair of pistols, currently named “The Big Bang,” will work.
“We wanted to raise the bar again,” said Cabot founder and President Rob Bianchin, “The pistol set will be a modern work of functional art and the ultimate set of luxury guns. It’s both romantic and fascinating to imagine that this meteor traveled across the heavens for four billion years before landing on Earth and is now being transformed into Cabot pistols.”
The pistol set is expected to go up for auction when finished, but Cabot said that it can only offer the vaguest estimates for price. There is speculation that the matched pistols will sell for over $1 million.
Transforming a meteorite into a gun may be new, but there have been cases where other weapons have been made from the material. The Gibeon meteorites are composed of an iron-nickel alloy with significant amounts of cobalt and phosphorus. Historically, pieces of meteorite have been found and used by the Nama people to make simple tools and weapons. More recently, legendary Japanese swordsmith Yoshindo Yoshiwara crafted a katana from a fragment of Gibeon meteorite. The sword is currently held at the Chiba Institute of Technology and is named, rather aptly, the Sword of Heaven.
