One of my shortcomings (there are so many) as a YouTube content maker is my camera work. It has never been steady and I have fallen over a tripod at least three time in the shop, so I decided to make a ceiling-mounted camera dolly to keep things out of the way and to give me both steady shots and the ability to pan/tilt/zoom with without much fuss at all.
I doodled in my sketch book for a while and used UniStrut and UniStrut trolleys as the core of the mechanism, then took 9 months off before getting the bulk of the work done.
The dolly body is made of 3/4 birch plywood. I designed it in the “rocket esthetic” in AutoCAD and then transferred the drawings to the free web-based version of Easel before cutting the main body pieces on the X-Carve. All the other parts were cut in the shop on conventional saws and all the hardware was sourced at Home Depot – except the UniStrut trolleys and hangers which came from McMaster-Carr. The trolleys were actually free for me as there were recycled at work after a building project was completed and I asked if I could have them. They sat in my basement for a year before I had the idea to use them for this project.
Unistrut hangers: https://www.mcmaster.com/strut-channel-hangers/strut-channel-trolley-brackets/
UniStrut: https://www.mcmaster.com/strut-channel-systems/strut-channel-5/
Unistrut Trolleys: https://www.mcmaster.com/strut-channel-hangers/strut-channel-trolleys-5/
Frank Howarth’s Camera Dolly: https://youtu.be/fHWJTVCOhBs
Bales Camera Track System: https://youtu.be/tiHoWwuTM4U