Neil, thanks for the kind words about my Photobucket account. I've always hoped someone would find it useful. I'll check out your account shortly - thank you kindly for the link.
There are actually already two drains on each side of the van at the bottom corners of the inner metal panel just in front of the wheel arch. They aren't very large, and I agree with you; to all appearances the design of this area would appear to have been relatively short-sighted engineering. Then again, I doubt the automotive Engineers ever would have believed that what they designed as utility vehicles would ever have developed a substantial base of owners who would take pride in nursing them into the next century, the way a Jaguar or Morgan owner (like me...) would with their sports cars.
Here's a picture of the driver side drains:
And the passenger side drains:
They require frequent maintenance to keep them open. After the thorough initial cleaning, I've taken to using a running water hose from above, and a brazing rod from below to ram out any debris.
I'm actually going to mount some stainless steel screen behind the wiper cowl grille vents to prevent leaf litter from ever again repeating this sort of buildup:
-Which is what I pulled out of *one* side of my van!!
When I looked down inside with a cantilevered mirror, I was amazed that the metal doesn't appear to have rusted internally! Odd design or not, they did a good job of making the metal relatively rustproof.
By the way, you will very likely need to heat the upper control arms with a torch to free up the ball joint enough to turn it with the big socket. Several treatments with penetrating oil well in advance of the main event might help.
Several months ago, someone here (maybe Shaggy?) posted some pictures of the interior of a shop in the U.K. which stocked many support items for custom vans, like the fender flares. It might be worth your time to search the website archive for it, as the duty and shipping would have been taken care of long ago, while they were lower.
The original color of my van must have been a solid metallic light blue. It has all been painted over by someone who had no idea what they were doing... they did bizarre things like applying an expensive vinyl graphics package directly on top of grey primer, without even de-waxing or scuffing the original surface first - which lead to flaking paint! And the darker blue was definitely applied with a hand-held spray can, without any masking in many areas. There's over spray everywhere! The dark blue hood had clear coat applied, but it was applied far too thickly, causing it to crack and craze. I none-too lovingly refer to the overall effect as "the world's 2nd ugliest paint job"... It's mostly going to be black in short order.
I checked my service manuals for you to see if they contained any information on decoding the data on the plate behind the battery, but they only decoded the V.I.N. - I don't know how to decode the paint information in that plate. Nate knows a lot about the various Dodge vans and their options; perhaps he could make some suggestions? Perhaps it would also be worth asking at
www.dodgetalk.com if no one else here can help you with it.
Regards