Arctic Upgrades

The 2018 Lego City Arctic series were a disappointment for me after much anticipation. The previous 2014 series was excellent so I was expecting a lot more this time. Unfortunately the builds were either a bit far from reality and just plain weird in some cases.

My son was gifted the 60191-1 Arctic Exploration team (above) and the 60193-1 Arctic Air Transport (below) sets. The Exploration set looked a bit under developed and the 4 rotor aircraft just looked odd....

So I decided to have a go at changing them up. As always I built the new design using Studio with a bit of tinkering with the physical parts with the blessing of Mr. 7+ year old.

The first one was the motor sled for 60191-1. The Lego original looked like it was rushed out with little thought to aesthetics or practicality. The trailer has a tiny little box that is lucky to fit a pair of snow shoes. By extending it, it will carry a 3x4 crate that will carry far more. I've even provided a ski mount on the top.

As for the motor sled, the Lego original frame looks skinny, the front assembly is unremarkable and the black track at the rear sticks out sideways too far.

I took some inspiration from a recent Lego design from the 60203-1 Ski Resort sled. The nose of both are identical save the colours. The rear of the vehicle is not. It took a number of iterations, but the result is a vast improvement.
This MOC has been uploaded to the BrickLink gallery and Rebrickable.

Above are the additional parts required to complete the Motor Sled Rescue upgrade.

The quad copter took a while to decide what to do with it. I wanted to do a build that didn't require additional parts. This posed a problem. The rotors are too small to build a conventional helicopter. And the original set, although complicated, doesn't necessarily have useful parts for some other type of aircraft. I settled on a twin rotor, Chinook configuration with, call it, a modern touch. A fair amount of the body of this build is very similar to the original, however, there had to be a number of structural changes to keep it functional, especially with the winch.
Does this build look better than the original? Probably not. Is it an alternate build that looks decent. Yes, I'd like to think so.

This build has been uploaded to the BrickLink Studio and Rebrickable.