I made a dolly!

Hello! In my attempt to make my first music video I had a shot in mind(or two) that I just couldn't replicate with a gimbal. So I thought I better make things easier for myself and try a diy dolly, how hard can it be?

After watching a tutorial how people built one from home depot I tried to find the necessary "ingredients" from B&Q and build one.

First I got a Neewer tripod dolly, it is the part where the tripod can be hooked onto a platform with three legs. That platform has hard wheels on a bolt that can be unscrewed. Then you can screw your own bolt with wheels, the bolt diameter is 10mm. I recommend length of around 60mm.

The wheels are on a v connector, I got a wider one that fits two wheels on one side, so one leg will have 4 wheels instead of 2. I recommend you look into ones that are not wide and fit one wheel each side only. The reason I got the wider one is because it had a hole in the middle that I can put a bolt through and connect the whole wheel platform to the tripod platform without any additional ways to hook it. But you don't need a hole in the middle, you can cut pieces of wood for example and nail them to the v connector and then screw the connecting 10mm bolt from them.

The v connector's holes are too small, so you need to drill bigger ones. You need 3 v connectors, each with 10mm hole diameter and 4 8mm diameter holes for the wheels.

Now onto the wheels. You need 12 wheels. The type of wheels is very important. I got longboard wheels which to be honest were not the best. In terms of size it was ok to use them, however they felt sticky while moving onto the railing pipes and make horrible sounds. If you have skateboard wheels - use those even though they might be small, use wheels that feel hard, try to make a friction with them onto some plastic and see if they feel sticky or smoothish and easy to roll. In the last picture here you will see I had to stick some material to make my wheels less sticky, so I taped them with some plastic tape which eliminated the sound.

For this project you need 3 wheel platforms with 4 wheels on each which means 12 wheels. Each wheel platform uses 4 wheels and each wheel uses 8mm diameter bolts and nuts, use 1 bolt and 3 nuts for each wheel - 2 nuts for spacing between the wheel and the v connector and 1 nut to tighten it on the v connector. For the whole project in total you need and 12 8mm bolts and 12 x 3 8mm nuts. I recommend length for the bolts to be 45mm.

Next, I found the pipes, 1.5m and around 40mm diameter with 4 angled ankles to join them. Then I had to cut them with a jigsaw to form the railings. Adjust the tripod dolly platform before deciding what the width of the rail should be.

Finally, start to roll the wheels on the rails and check your alignment, once you are happy use superglue on all the bolts to make sure nothing falls off :)

In terms of stability, because my tripod is quite cheap and its pipes are very lightweight I experience a small shake with movement if the wheels are not perfectly aligned. I have tried to align all the wheels but what I think will help is putting some weight on the tripod. Also putting a gimbal on top of it will definitely help.

So I think I am sorted, I think I might change its wheels in the future but for now it might work.