9 Dec 18

Jury – Rig  (also known as Jury Rigging) was first known to be used in 1788 and its origin is from sailing ships.

Jury… Meaning; To make use of any material at hand to make repair.

Rig… Meaning; To make repairs to the ships rigging

More at Wikipedia

From AC6V’s website:

jury-rig is based on one word “jury” which is a nautical sense meaning ‘makeshift; temporary’ and one word “rig” referring to a ship’s sails and masts. The first known example of this “jury” is the compound jury-mast, ‘a temporary mast put up to replace one that has been broken or lost’, attested since the early seventeenth century. A jury-rig, then, is ‘a temporary or makeshift rigging’, and the verb is used figuratively in the sense ‘to assemble or arrange hastily in a makeshift manner’. The origin of this word “jury” is not certain, but some scholars identify it with iuwere, a late Middle English word meaning ‘help; aid’, borrowed from the Old French ajurie