Snow/Lake Ice Driving - Jerking/Vibration

Hopefully a simple(ish) question for those of you with more time behind the wheel of a Tacoma than me!

Monday I took my stock (including tires), approximately 10k mile 2019 OR 4x4 out ice fishing. Conditions were super cold, and the surface ranged from bare ice, to hard packed snow, to loose snow drifts. I was in 4hi the whole time, with traction control on (didn’t disable at any point). Overall the truck handled great through all conditions- a couple of rock back and forth to get going again after stopping, but that was really it for slowing the truck down.

My question relates to some bucking/vibration/shaking of the truck, primarily (if I’m remembering correctly) when going through some of the deeper drifts. Was this a result of VSC/TRAC correcting for slippage, or something like axle wrapping? It happened a few times, but seemed to go away after I got a little forward momentum.

Nothing noticeably wrong with the truck on the drive home, just wondering if it’s something I should be concerned about, or if there’s something I should do differently or watch out for in the future. I’ve never had it happen on snowy road conditions or dirt roads, but I also probably haven’t had it in this much snow since I got the truck.

 

My guess is you got snow chunks in some of your wheels making them unbalanced. Happens to me when I go out playing in the snow but eventually melt or fling off after driving for a couple.

 

Was the truck kind of "hopping"? The tires were spinning in the snow and the truck dropped a little and got a little traction and it became a cycle. Normal for deepish snow but hard on the u-joints and cv shafts

 

This is kind of my suspicion. But given it was snow on ice I was just surprised that I’d get enough traction to have it do that, especially not with any better tire than stock.

 

Def traction control. I've driven my Tacoma in several feet of snow. Had the "bucking" too. It's traction control sending power to different wheels to help aide traction.

 

Axle Wrap. It was terrible in my 09 after I added an add-a-leaf. My 17 has it but not nearly as bad. Most all leaf sprung solid rear axle trucks experience it. Tacoma's seem to have it worse than others.

 

Do you anything to mitigate it? Or just avoid the conditions that create it? Is it more of an annoyance or a longevity concern if you’re running into it more than every once in a while?

Like I said, happened a handful of times for me, primarily when taking off (or when the truck got a little bogged down) in deep snow, then went away once I got moving. To me traction control in that situation makes more sense, since traction should have been pretty poor, but from what I saw on YouTube it sure looked/felt like axle wrap. Just trying to avoid breaking/unnecessarily wearing stuff on a relatively new truck, but it also seemed unavoidable in the conditions (and obviously not getting stuck when it’s -10 was a priority).

 

Grease the slip joint.

 

There are a few people who have had luck using this : https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/goodbye-axle-wrap-mod.108316/ Cheap and worth a shot but I didn't have luck with that on my second gen. I think it helped a little, but it was definitely still there and was pretty violent in deep snow and loose sand. I always greased my u-joints during oil changes but never tried the slip yoke, seems like another cheap quick thing to try.

I'm pretty sure the issue is with the thickness of the factory leaf springs. From all the research I've done the best route would be to replace the leaf pack with a quality pack like a OME or ICON. Bud-built also makes a bolt on trac bar that would solve it. Not sure if its available for a third gen though.