High-end handgun maker Cabot Guns is making a pair of pistols from a meteorite.
Cabot Guns announced that its "extra-terrestrial pistols" will be forged from a meteorite as old as the Earth itself, and could sell for as much as $1 million at auction next year.
"It hasn't been done before and that's the kind of thing that drives me," said Cabot founder and president Rob BiaNchin in an email to CNNMoney. "I think it's fair to state many of the pistols we have constructed border on art."
"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," BiaNchin said.
Cabot, a four-year-old company located near Pittsburgh that's sometimes called the Rolls Royce of gun makers.The company's clients include actor Joe Mantegna, rocker Kid Rock and Twisted Sister's Dee Snyder.
BiaNchin said that holding the meteorite is "awe inspiring," but it is difficult to work with. He compared the cutting of the meteorite "to cutting a rare diamond."
Cabot has fashioned a pair of pistol grips from the meteorite, and BiaNchin is now confident they can move on to building an entire gun.
"We were not sure it was possible, but we have passed the critical stage of construction and we are confident these will be a fully functional set of left and right-handed mirror image pistols," he said. "Building each component has been a science experiment."
The gun company plans to forge its "Big Bang pistol set" from a 35-kilogram chunk of the Gibeon meteorite, which crashed to Earth 4.5 billion years ago and was discovered in Namibia in the 1830s.
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The meteorite will be fashioned into a pair of semiautomatic .45 caliber pistols of the 1911 style. Cabot specializes in the 1911 pistols, which were invented in the late 1800s and used by the U.S. military for more than 80 years, serving through both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.
According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Gibeon is prized for its unusual patterns of crystallized metal, known as the Widmanstätten lines.
The Gibeon is actually a massive deposit of meteorites totaling many tons of iron. Polished, palm-sized pieces are selling on eBay, starting at about $50.
