The Colt Canada IUR: My Current Obsession

Just when I thought I didn’t need another AR-15 variant in the safe, the Colt Canada IUR goes on sale.

If you’re not familiar, Colt Canada was formerly Diemaco, and produces the light arms issued to the Canadian Forces. As a result, they make interesting milspec guns, and have done very little with civilian sales until 2015. Back in February they released the SA20 and SA15.7, which are semi-auto versions of the C7 and C8 rifles, along with a handful of IURs.

IUR stands for integrated monolithic receiver, more commonly known as a monolithic upper. The idea is there’s no handguard here. The entire upper is one complete rail system. There are a few reasons to do this:

• First, your accuracy is improved by free floating the barrel
• You now have a single long plane of rail up top. Great for mounting night vision.
• Anything mounted to your handguard rails is now 100% stable and will not lose zero

The IUR comes with some other fun things like a grenade launcher recoil lug and integrated QD sling mounts. I’ve had it out the range a few times, and am immensely pleased with it. Expect a video coming someday soon.

I really didn’t plan to jump on the Colt Canada wagon, but while the initial run of IURs were right at $1000, this latest run of “blemished” units were sold off for a song at $550. Regardless of whether you buy into the Diemaco Mythos, that’s a pretty good price for a monolithic upper and exceptional barrel. From the internet scuttlebutt I read, it looks like all the IURs in Canada are overruns from the Danish Military contract. These blemished uppers went back and forth across the Atlantic, but certainly don’t seem any worse for wear. I couldn’t find any marks on mine, and am proceeding to put my own use marks on it anyway.

So until I have a real handle on how it shoots and form a proper opinion, here’s some photos.