Just a thought, what if you were to take a ladder rack, some dzus fasteners and some pieces of sheet metal and make it so you can enclose your ladder rack like a canopy? Best of both worlds, I'm sure you could make it look better than just rednecking some metal on there too.

 

sounds like a cool project. I've seen something like that that a guy did with scrap diamond plate, looked pretty good...

let me know if you (or anyone else) takes on this project, would be interesting to see the results....