The Collaborative International Dictionary
jury-rigged \ju"ry-rigged`\, a. (Naut.) Rigged for temporary service; done or made using whatever materials are available; makeshift; as, the survivors used jury-rigged fishing gear. See Jury, a.
Syn: improvised, makeshift.
Wiktionary
improvise from whatever is available. v
(en-past of: jury-rig)
WordNet
adj. done or made using whatever is available; "crossed the river on improvised bridges"; "the survivors used jury-rigged fishing gear"; "the rock served as a makeshift hammer" [syn: improvised, makeshift]
Usage examples of "jury-rigged".
Not only was all of this incredibly jury-rigged, it actually looked as if many of the operations that should have been automatic had deliberately been made manual.
In the dimming light, she saw jury-rigged control boxes taped to consoles.
Tall said, with a scornful gesture toward the jury-rigged control board.
He ducked to take his place where a jury-rigged control board had been sited.
He explained it-what circuits he had cut out, what ones had been shorted, just how the jury-rigged mechanical sequence fitted in.
The community had a jury-rigged, low-power radio on which a constant listening watch was kept, but which was rarely used for transmission because of the danger of detection.
I was sweating over my jury-rigged tracker, hoping to Heaven that the makeshift shock absorbers would be good enough when we opened up.
Good thing she had, too, she now realized, or this entire jury-rigged expedition would have wound up scattered halfway across Erewhon's orbit.
The button had the vague appearance of being something jury-rigged, not to mention—Berry almost giggled at the absurdity of the melodrama—having been painted bright red.
I'm willing to bet that they've jury-rigged their own, independent system to do the job.
Eight men and five women, all of them armed with jury-rigged bludgeons—very primitive.
The Masadans wouldn't have jury-rigged a blow-it-up-now switch in the engineering compartments in addition to the one she was sure they'd set up on the bridge.
So, some time later, as they walked back toward the hangar—a converted barn, jury-rigged like everything else—he finally got up the nerve to ask the question he'd been mulling over for several weeks.
If Jeff Higgins and Jimmy Andersen can sink a genu-wine Spanish galleon with a fishing boat and a jury-rigged black-powder torpedo, we're going to look like pure fools if we can't do the same with all the fancy modern gear we've got.
Obviously, the firing mechanism had malfunctioned—not surprisingly, given the crude nature of the jury-rigged installation—but that wasn't what brought Jesse's heart into his throat.