Arriving at Chapman/Leonard you’ll drive through what might not seem like the right place. I drove past a lot of industrial buildings almost thinking I’m lost but then I see the beautiful greenery covering the main office. I pull into the first spot and I’m almost instantly greeted by a gentleman who walks up to me and says hi how can I help you with a like your in the wrong spot lol…I was about to pull into Niki’s grandfathers spot. Oops…my bad. He was totally cool about it though. I was a lil early and walked into the machine shop. The gentleman right at the front I asked for Nichole and he said the office was through the door to my right. I walked in and was again greeted by a nice lady behind the desk answering calls. I told he I’m here to see Nichole and that I was early. I’ve been doing nothing but driving it seems and 30 miles equals up to an hour and a half like minimum. So I left like 2 hours early so I wouldn’t be late. The office has a large stack of industry magazines and a pictures on the wall of awards, movies with their equipment on sets. It instantly felt comfortable.

So Niki arrives(this is what her friends and family call her-so hopefully I can get away with referring to her by her nickname throughout this post). At this point I’m having a back and forth convo with a good friend of mine in Texas via text and didn’t notice her till she said Hello Ryan. Wow yup there’s Niki…granted it’s been like a decade she’s all grown up. She greeted me with a big smile. She says ok…you ready…let’s go. I’m like ok cool. She gets us some safety glasses since the Tour was going to start next door in their Machine Shop. If you follow my Instagram you’ll see me refurbishing an old Elemack Spyder dolly and my Pops friend helped me rebuild a missing column. So I’ve been around his friends machine shop. Their machine shop where they design, build, test, and maintain the equipment they build is second to none. More impressive is everything they build…they build it right there in the USA in the Head Quarters in North Hollywood. Omg…I was blown away by the state of the art Machinery. Niki was so knowledgeable with absolutely everything. She literally took me to every building throughout. Showing me how they’ve taken gears and now use newer lighter metals, introducing me everyone behind every phase of the process to the guy assembling the guts of their dollies, to a passing engineer he stops and says hello and we have a brief convo. I get to see the big camera trucks you’ll see on hit Television shows like Bones, the mini dollies custom built that you’ll see on the sideline at the Superbowl, Hydraulic powered Camera Trucks, Massive AirBag suspension to handle the weight but keep the ride smooth, down to the dollies across from their machine shop that house a ton of the dollies you might be familiar seeing behind the scenes of every type of motion picture-just look at the credits as I do and you’ll see Chapman/Leonard on tons of them(as you can see in the photo of Niki and me with Chapman/Leonard in the background. Track wheels, track for days, curved track, straigh track, accessories for anything you can think of they have or as she states…we custom build. Our customers come back to us with Feedback and we respond by making updates to build exactly what they want. Again everything is built under one roof here in NoHo…or should I say many roofs. Their Head Quarters spans are very impressive footprint…She must have taken me through half a dozen buildings.