What Is A Jiffy Stand On A Harley-Davidson Motorcycle, And Where Did The Name Come From?

In just about any and every industry in the world, most major brands like to think they're the very first ones to come up with some of the industry's bedrock elements. That's a bit of an odd thing about conceptual ubiquity; when everyone's been doing the same thing for long enough, it's borderline impossible to figure out who actually started doing it first. However, on a rare occasion, there are scraps of history that can indicate either when a company was the first to do something or when a company actually came up with a wholly original concept that got rolled up into something generic.

Case in point: what do you call the small folding hook on the bottom of your motorcycle, designed to keep it propped up when you're not riding it? Probably a "kickstand," right? That's the ubiquitous term, and if you called such a device on most motorcycles a kickstand, you would usually be right. However, in the specific case of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, that device actually has a distinctive name: the Jiffy Stand. Based on historical documentation, the Jiffy Stand may have actually been one of the progenitors of the side-mounted kickstand concept.

Functionally, there isn't a whole lot that differentiates a Harley-Davidson Jiffy Stand from the kickstand you'd find on any other motorcycle. Like a kickstand, a Jiffy Stand is mounted on the bottom-left of a Harley bike's body. Nudge it open with your foot, and it sticks out, providing a sturdy yet flexible joint that props the vehicle up while it's stationary. One nifty distinction of the Jiffy Stand is that it has a tab that connects to the main joint, which flips and locks into place when the bike's weight is placed on it. This ensures that the stand can't be folded unless the bike is picked up, which helps prevent toppling.

The original bicycle rear kickstand is believed to have been invented around the late 1860s, and it was then incorporated into motorcycles decades later. In the specific case of side-mounted stands for motorcycles, Harley-Davidson may have been one of the first on the scene in the early 1900s. Based on a motorcycle magazine from 1935 uncovered by Revzilla, Harley-Davidson began offering Jiffy Stands as accessories to its bikes primarily to aid police officers, as it would pop out "in a jiffy" (hence, the name Jiffy Stand) to allow them to dismount quickly when responding to criminal activity. Revzilla also found a patent image of a 1928 Harley bike with the Jiffy Stand, so it's quite possible that all the side stands we have today may have originated from this singular concept.