Anyone know if the recoil part of the T2 guns can be replaced (and are the parts still available)? I have a couple of the T2 guns, but the recoil mechanism is broken in both guns.
I believe Midway just used pinball coils for the guns. I contacted Happ (who owns all the Midway stuff now) to ask if they still make the specific coil for the guns, and they said they do not. You might just be able to use any pinball coil, I dunno...
Howard C is supposed to be working on a wrapper for Mame to allow rumble controllers thru DirectX. This could possibly be applied to things like Q*bert, Outrun, T2 etc. This would make it easy for anyone to get the recoil by hacking a rumble gamepad or something. I do have Dave Widel's mame driver for the LED hack (you'll have to compile it into Mame yourself) and I have sucessfully used it to power the recoil on my guns! I am planning to put up a schematic of the circuitry required on my site soon...
As for making your own guns, I originally bought the Dual Strikes with the intention of turning it on it's side and gluing a toy uzi in place of the right control handle as someone mentioned above. Luckily, I came across an amazing dutch auction of about 20 T2 guns on ebay, and managed to pick up two of them for $50!!!

Since I had the Dual Strikes already, I used them for the interface, which just happened to work out really well.
I would suggest for anyone who wants to buy the guns, look for completed auctions to get a good idea of the price you should be prepared to pay. If you've got some patience, keep watching ebay and if you see a "buy it now" price under $50 each, GO FOR IT!!
Also, these guns are not just for playing T2. You can play any gun game with them. And it's way cooler with the recoil! If you've ever played T2 on a well-maintained machine, then you know why it was great! It was one of the early games to use actual images and digitized voices of movie actors, and was a cool adaptaion of the movie too. Many fond memories of playing this in college...