Tire size 4x4 dilemma

Hey guys, I am new here and only recently bought a 96 Tacoma so I know next to nothing about it. I have looked online at different forums for the the answer to this and have gotten different results so I just wanted to ask here.

I am living out in Montana right now and it snows pretty bad here during the winter months. I am usually good keeping my car in 2wd, but on nights like tonight where it just started dumping a bunch of snow unexpectedly then I slide much more than I like. I think part of the reason is that I have a reg cab 96 4cyl so its pretty light and riding on Wild Country XTXs that are pretty damn wide, Im sorry I dont have a more accurate measurement for them. Well on night like tonight I would like to use 4wd and I have, but now here comes the issue. The two front tires are 32''s and the 2 back ones are 31''s. I bought the truck like this, and they all have even tread, so I am pretty sure they were all placed on at the same time. I have only used 4wd to get out of icy patches and tonight used it to drive a friend home who loves about a mile away. I am mainly wondering how bad this is for my 4x4. I read that it could break your Transfer case if you use 4wd with uneven sized tires for even only a couple of seconds, but like I said I did use it to take my friend home and it seemed to work fine. Is using 4hi in the condition of snow/ice roads going to seriously damage my truck? I would only use it on nights where I have to drive during snowfall. They are pretty good about plowing the roads here so I can still drive 2wd for the most part, there are just nights where I may have to go out before they can plow.

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys!

 

with the appropriate wheel slippage situations like on ice or other low traction situations where 4x4 is used, I would think there would be no problem with uneven sized wheels. But IDK ive never really thought about it.

 

You'll probably be ok as long as you're on snow, but I wouldn't recommend it. You also may run into some handling issues because the tires will be slipping. If you run across some bare asphalt while in 4wd there's a very real possibility you could munch your transfer case, depending how long you're on asphalt and how often. I would recommend picking up some like-sized tires.

 

Well I drove around a little bit this morning after it had been snowing all night. Had to use 4wd, it worked out pretty well, although after a little while I started to feel a weird skipping, so I stopped driving after that. I think I'm just going to fork out the money for some like-sized Duratrac's. Hopefully I didn't already cause permanent damage to anything in the truck.