Chicken feed! Let me whip out my checkbook, or can they take ultra-platinum black diamond credit cards? Joking aside, my eyes almost popped out upon learning the price of the“Big Bang Pistol Set” done by Cabot Gun as the price is set at US$4.5 million. First announced in December 2015, this set of left and right pistols are made from a meteorite. That's right! Made of rock that came from outer space!
Cabot Gun forged, if that is the proper word for this project, this pair of 1911 pistols out of a chunk of the Gibeon Meteorite and that means the main material of the set is over 4 billion years old as that was around that time the Gibeon Meteor collided with Planet Earth, hitting an area in Africa what is now known as Namibia. In ancient times people from the area used the ore from the meteorite for implements and weapons and Western explorers learned about it in the 19th Century.
Prized by jewelers for its Widmanstätten pattern, the ore that was used for the Cabot Gun is project 85 percent iron with trace quantities of nickel, cobalt and other metals. In a press release from the company, the explained how they made the set:
Cabot Guns used X-ray photography, 3-D modeling, CAD-CAM design, aerospace construction techniques, electron-beam technology, and endless hours of careful craftsmanship to create two matching (left and right handed) out-of-this-world specimens based on John Moses Browning’s legendary 1911-style pistol design.
Each component was laboriously planned, tested and painstakingly cut to incorporate both the exterior bark (regmaglypts) and interior of the meteorite as design elements.
The aesthetic finish of the pistols is Cabots’ homage to the various states that can be drawn from this rarest of material. The Widmanstatten pattern was developed by the very slow cooling of the planetesimal core at a rate of a few degrees per million years. “Drawing out the Widmanstatten from the material through acid etching is an art itself,” say Cabot COO and lead engineer, Michael Hebor. “It has a will of it’s own.”
The result is an aesthetic tour-de-force -- from the prized Widmanstetten pattern adorning both major and minor surfaces to the high-polish grips and judicious use of the meteor’s “bark” on the trigger face and grips. And yes, the guns work.
With a price of US$4.5 million, this makes it the most expensive gun set in history. We assume that when this gets bought and test fired by the new owner, this won’t see a firing range again and will be displayed amongst the expensive of collections the owner has at home (or museum).
So fancy an airsoft gun made by a Meteorite? If Clarence Lai, aka the “Airsoft Surgeon” learns about this, he might stop using Swarovski crystals for his expensive custom guns and try to get a chunk of Gibeon meteorite for his own custom projects. That is, if someone who collects exquisite airsoft guns can also afford a custom airsoft gun made from the same ore as the Cabot Gun Big Bang Pistol Set. That means millions of dollars.