Jury rig

From Free net encyclopedia

Jury rigging or ghetto engineering refers to makeshift repairs or substitutes, made with only the tools and materials that happen to be on hand.

1 Nautical use
2 Other Forms
3 See also
4 References

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Nautical use

On sailing ships, the jury rig is a replacement mast and yards improvised in case of loss of the original mast.

There are these theories about the origin of the term "jury" in this sense:-

A Latin and Old French root meaning "aid" or "succour".
"jury-mast" derived from "injury-mast".
From French du jour = "of the day", thus `temporary'.

While ships typically carried a number of spare spars such as topmasts, the lower masts, at up to one meter in diameter, were too large to carry spares. So a jury mast could be various things. Contemporary drawings and paintings show a wide variety of jury rigs, attesting to the creativity of sailors faced with the need to save their ships. Examples are:-

A spare topmast.
The main boom of a brig.
To replace the foremast with the mizzenmast: mentioned in W. Brady's The Kedge Anchor (1852),
The bowsprit set upright and tied to the stump of the real mast.

Ships always carried a variety of spare sails, so rigging the jury mast once erected was mostly a matter of selecting appropriately sized spares.

Although ships were observed to perform reasonably well under jury rig, the rig was quite a bit weaker than the original, and the ship's first priority was normally to steer for the nearest friendly port and get replacement masts.

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