Dukes of Hazzard Pinball: The Road to Hazzard

Building the Custom Dukes of Hazzard Pinball Machine

Early on into buying pins, one of the first things I did was to search around and find out if a Dukes of Hazzard pinball machine was ever manufactured. To my surprise there wasn’t one. There were a few toy pinball games but not the real thing. It was a surprise then and it is still surprising to me to this day. The Dukes of Hazzard in its heyday was a licensing juggernaut; they licensed out almost everything you can imagine from lunch boxes to board games, and even Underoos, but alas no pin was ever created.

So, through the years of collecting, buying, selling, restoring, and promoting pinball, I started to collect photos of re-themed and fully custom built pinball machines, which eventually led me to creating the Strictly Custom Pinball Machines group on Facebook. Once the group started growing and I saw so many other fantastic custom pins and gathered so many ideas, knowledge, and contacts, it was time to start my own project.

I started calling some friends that have made other custom games to get their input and gather more insight, and spoke to several artists. I decided to go with Stu Wright of Mad Voodoo as he’s a friend and local. I then had to acquire a donor game, a Bally Paragon, even though there’s not much left of the original game.  It was important to have a base to start with. I then asked friends Kaydee and Olivia Helm of if they’d like to be a part of this project. Their role was quite more simplistic than what I had in mind but I’m thrilled that they took my ideas way up to the next level. Next was the cabinet prep. I had another friend Chris Spaseff of Arizona Pinball Restoration on board for that part, but he got backlogged with work and couldn’t get to it in time. Thankfully Kaydee and Olivia took it upon themselves to do all the cabinet work as well. One interesting note is that they did find an excellent match of orange paint for the General Lee, the Dodge Charger in the show.  It wasn’t a simple task, since despite what anyone might tell you, there is actually no specific color code for the paint on that car.