Decades in the Making. Generations in Motion.

Long before Armstrong Kinetic Solutions, before the patents and prototypes, Larry Armstrong was an eleven-year-old boy with an idea.

He lived at the top of a hill. At the bottom lived a girl who had caught his attention.

Larry had a bicycle, but he wanted something more: a braking system of his own design. He imagined riding down the hill and coming to a stop when the girl was outside. So, like any young inventor, he decided to build one.

He installed his homemade braking system on the bicycle and set off down the hill. There was just one problem: he had put the brake on the front wheel instead of the back.

When Larry applied the brake on his way down, the bicycle pitched forward, sending him over the handlebars. And when he looked up, the girl was gone.

His first invention had not worked quite as planned. But at eleven, Larry had already begun doing something that would stay with him: noticing a problem, imagining a mechanical solution, and attempting to build it himself.

The journey of invention had begun. And it was far from over.

Larry kept building. His work eventually took him from personal experiments to documented inventions, awards, and the patent system.

On April 4, 1986, he took first place in the Small Business Division of the Wes Watkins New Product and Process Fair, an Oklahoma competition for new products and processes.

On July 31, 1990, he was issued U.S. Patent 4,944,124 for a Decorative Panel with Cutline, an invention in an entirely different field.

Larry used that patent to start a company, Reel Rock. Reel Rock makes molded plastic siding panels for mobile homes. Each piece is made by heating the plastic in a mold, taking it out, cooling it, and painting it.

Larry built all of the company's machines himself, and he still fixes them today. He knows them well because he made them.

The business is still going, and it gave Larry the time to pursue his other inventions and creative work.

The range of those early projects matters. Larry was not confined to one machine or market. He pursued practical problems wherever he thought he could design a solution.

Over time, vehicle motion and energy recovery became a central question. On July 14, 2008, Larry filed an application for a Vehicle Suspension Kinetic Energy Recovery System, published on January 14, 2010 as US 2010/0006362 A1. It was an earlier answer to the same question, and a different design from the one patented in 2025.

The later system, described in U.S. Patent 12,409,695 B2, became the foundation of AKS.

In his fifth-grade classroom in Eufaula, Oklahoma, Avery Armstrong found an opportunity in something simple: paper spinning tops. Two classmates made them. Avery sold them for a dollar apiece.

He was learning about business in the most direct way possible. One day, he added some of the other children's tops to his inventory without permission. His teacher, Mrs. Bryant, made him return them. The lesson was unmistakable: other people's things were not his to sell.

It was Mrs. Bryant's first year of teaching. Avery thinks they both learned a lot from each other.

The paper tops were not his only enterprise. After recess, Avery sold water bottles from his locker. School cafeteria staff gave him extras, which kept the venture supplied.

It was a fifth grader experimenting with selling, supply, demand, and the limits of ownership. Years later, those spinning tops would return in an entirely unexpected setting.

By eighth grade, Avery had set an objective for himself: Duke University. He remembers watching a video of an AAU basketball team at Duke. The university captured his imagination, and he began telling people he planned to go there.

The name Duke already had a place in his family. His great-uncle Keith Duke worked at the local post office, and Avery's grandmother would take him by. To Avery, it is only fitting that he traveled to Duke for his studies.

In high school, his history teacher, Mr. Thompson, taught him many lessons about history and was passionate about the arts. The one Avery remembers best was a lesson on the business tycoons Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie. After class, he went to the library and picked up a book about them.

Biographies were not new to him. In elementary school, whenever the class went to the library, he read short biographies of inventors and artists, one after another.

Mr. Thompson also told him he would win a scholarship, and Avery did: The Gates Scholarship. He knew then that he had to go to Duke.

He kept the objective in mind. In time, he arrived at Duke, where he studies political science and philosophy, with a certificate in innovation and entrepreneurship. The university became part of the background from which his work with Larry would grow.

At sixteen, Avery took his first job, at Top Value, a discount grocery business. He learned the day-to-day workings of the store and improved his ability to work with customers. He became its first Employee of the Month.

After about a year, he began working at Carlton Landing Boat Club, preparing boats and driving them for customers. It was a different kind of business and a different kind of clientele, but the underlying work was familiar: showing up, serving people well, and learning the details that make an operation run.

These jobs did not train him as a mechanical engineer. They taught him service, business operations, and interpersonal confidence, skills he would later draw on while developing AKS.

Avery says that if you visit Larry's office, Larry has probably made a new invention that day. He takes an afternoon nap in his office recliner about once a day, and he often wakes up with new ideas.

In the winter of 2025–2026, Avery was home from Duke when Larry called him into the office. Larry wanted to show his great-nephew an invention he had been developing.

Larry used a push-down spinning topper to explain it. He had taken many of the toys apart and knew their insides. Avery did not fully understand the invention at first, but the topper gave him a familiar starting point.

Avery remembered his fifth-grade classroom and the paper tops he once sold for a dollar. A childhood object had unexpectedly returned, now tied to a discussion of converting mechanical movement into rotation.

Before Avery left, Larry handed him a copy of the patent. Avery took it home and read it. He had come to understand the analogy. Next, he wanted to understand the invention.

Reading the patent did not end the conversation. Avery began researching the invention and the field around it.

There was no single ceremonial moment at which they decided everything had become a company. The work and the conversations developed, and Larry and Avery chose the name Armstrong Kinetic Solutions together.

The company brought two forms of experience into contact: Larry's long practice of invention and Avery's growing work in research, organization, communication, and building partnerships.

The invention now has a company behind it. AKS's mission is supplying the world with an abundance of clean energy, and it begins that pursuit with the Armstrong Kinetic Regenerative Suspension, the system described in Larry's granted U.S. Patent 12,409,695 B2.

The founders have brought the idea into contact with real manufacturing work: housing models, machined components, suspension springs, supplier conversations, and early prototype development.

Each photograph marks a step forward, but none replaces the measurements that must ultimately determine the system's effectiveness.

There is work ahead: assembly, controlled bench testing, on-vehicle evaluation, reliability assessment, and the careful accounting of recovered energy and system-level tradeoffs.

The story does not end with a promise that everything has been solved. It ends with an invitation to follow the work, and with the recognition that it began long before there was a company to name.