There are several companies out there selling very good, but also very expensive panoramic tripod heads. Those are mostly of very good quality and I guess the price is not really a big deal for professionals, their equipment quite often is about 20 or 50 times the value. You can find a pretty complete list of manufactors on the panotools website. But if you like to get started with panoramic photography as non-professional you are probably not convinced about investing 300€ before you even know if panoramic photography is the thing for you. For me, it was the same. So I searched for do-it-yourself tutorials of panoramic heads and I indeed found a lot.
But, most of them were focused on the regular guy without a lot of tools at hand and used very basic materials from the hardware store as well as pretty easy assembly techniques. The results were fair for the effort, but they have some problems competing with the commercial solutions.