American company Cabot Guns has recently unveiled a pair of “extra-terrestrial pistols” made almost entirely from a piece of Gibeon meteorite that crashed on Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago and was discovered in Namibia, in the 1830’s.
“It hasn’t been done before and that’s the kind of thing that drives me,” Rob Bianchin, founder of Cabot Guns, said last year, when the company first announced its intention to forge twin 1911 handguns out of Gibeon. “Meteor is rare, more so than terrestrial precious metals and I wanted to create a set of guns that were formed from a material that had intrinsic value,” he added.
For the last five months, the expert gun makers at the respected company that many refer to as the “Rolls Royce of firearms” have been hard at work, trying to cut as many necessary pieces from the expensive lump of meteorite. It was a tougher job than most people realize, or as Bianchin puts it “we were sweating bullets. That first cut, when we sliced the meteorite chunk in two, was really scary.” Luckily, the team had some experience after using Gibeon to craft meteorite grips for one their standard 1911 handguns. That first success inspired them to push the envelope and create the world’s first meteorite firearms.
