Harold Dickert made his career of flying commuter planes around the Great Lakes, and instructing others on how to do the same.
Nowadays, Dickert spends his time building custom guitars out of a home workshop in north Burlington. The two passions are more intertwined than it seems at first glance.
“I started messing around with model airplanes, like quarter scale models out of plastic,” Dickert said. “When I was 12 or 13, I started building them from balsa wood, and my dad had gotten his private pilot’s license in 67.”
Using the skills he developed working on model planes,
Dickert modified his own guitar, a 1968 Toledo that he thinks cost his parents around $20 – a high end model at the time. He added some new electronics and switches to the guitar, and later found himself buying a few guitar kits and seeing what he could pull from them.
The first two guitars were finished in 2022, and Dickert has been collecting wood working equipment and building both electric and acoustic guitars since.
“If you were to buy a guitar kit on eBay and bolt it together, or if you are to take your favourite guitar – which might be covered in grime and totally dismantle it, clean it up and put it back together, those people are guitar builders,” Dickert said.
As he was moving houses – into the north Burlington home with space for a shop – Dickert fell 28 feet from his roof, breaking his back.
The fall forced him off work for four years – though he retired shortly after returning to work to pursue guitar making.
“It almost killed me, they told my wife to gather the family,” Dickert said. “But I was in really good shape, I used to be a pretty hardcore windsurfer and skier.”
A friend helped Dickert move some equipment from a small shop space he had rented into his basement.
For the first year after the fall, Dickert essentially only moved from bed to the workshop.
“I was rehabbed by building guitars, that was the motivation to get me on my feet,” he said.
Dickert now takes his guitars across southern Ontario, showing them to other luthiers and putting them up for sale.
His guitars are played by artists around Burlington, and sold through Birchway Sound in Hamilton.
“So now I’m 67, and I’ve continued on with these things,” Dickert said. “I can't ski, I can’t wind surf, if I’m on a bumpy road my back hurts like hell so I don’t drive that much. But I get to hang out with musicians, which is arguably more interesting than hanging out with pilots.”
Dickert couldn’t spend all that time around guitars and not start his own band. Forming Mind Flight – a possible nod to the pilot life, though even he isn’t so sure about where the name came from – with a few friends in a garage when he was 17, he still jams with his former bandmates, and has even built a few instruments for them.
In the basement workshop, dozens of guitars are hung on the walls. Some are his own creation, and some are repairs for friends.
“Out of high school the only people I still know are my two bandmates, Steve and Tony,” Dickert said. “Tony was here the other day, and that one over there is for him.”
Dickert pointed at a guitar top – the front of the guitar – on a bench being worked on, with a more interesting backstory than many professional player’s signature models.
“This top came off a branch from a tree in his old back yard,” Dickert said. “His granddaughter, it turns out, is quite a gifted musician. She’s in a program sponsored by Shania Twain. She used to swing on the branch this wood came from, and one day it’s going to be her guitar.”
Anyone interested in Dickert guitars can learn more on Harold’s website.
