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How to Build a DIY wooden camera dolly with PVC railing system

Person setting up a camera on a tripod for filming on a small wheeled platform.

If you need a dolly for your movie masterpiece, you don't need to go with a professional dolly system. You can save that money for your expensive actors and actresses by building your own DIY camera dolly on the cheap. You'll need some nuts and bolts, PVC pipes, scrap wood, drill bits and a drill, inline wheels and a hammer. This homemade camera dolly will cost you around 65 bucks.

Straight from David's blog post:

"So as we mention in our video… we've been contracted to shoot a video in which we're going to need a dolly and track. The length we need for this thing sort of has to be five feet. We found one system that turned out to be outrageously expensive, and aside from that, all others were too short or too long. That brought us to the notion that, along with many other people out there, we could just build our own dolly that's perfect for us, but cheap to boot!

"The base of the dolly is made from MDF and wood, and a few nuts and bolts to hold everything together. The rails of it are made with some PVC pipe and inline wheels. The track is just made out of some wood and slightly wider diameter PVC pipe. If ever we want to have a longer track, it's a matter of heading to home depot and spending $22 for two lengths of 10 foot pipe. Not at all a lot of money. The footage we got was really great using the dolly. I feel that as long as you put some effort into it, you can make your own version of this thing really easily and it's quite handy. Any questions are welcome since this is the first video we've pumped that's about how to build something."

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