just after some tips/ suggestions on the process of hiding the wires in the engine bay of an XE?

Couple of tricks there.
Bonnet release cable : Just need a hole punch to hide the cable under the guard. It goes up under the guard ok, but needs help getting back out at the front of the bonnet.
Same for the Lighting Wiring : when I did this (7 years ago now) I got all of the wiring to go up under the gaurd, run through some convoluted tubing (Electrical shop). Had relays etc mounted just below the headlight on the drivers side for Horn, Lights etc. (ok : The XE doesnt have relays, but it makes the lights work so much better).
I ran all of the Wiring for the engine to a single "milspec" plug that had about 20 pins in it, that was on the firewall slightly offset to the passenger side of the engine, but was also just under the heater box so it was installed without having to remove the heater box. Again, use hole punches.

Keeping all the wires neat around the engine itself is up to your imagination.

You have a couple of choices with speedo transducer and trans wiring if you need it. One of my mates ran the wiring for this straight up near the shifter. I ran it through the connector that I had put in for engine wiring so that I could undo one plug and remove the engine completely without having to unplug everything.

For an example of how effective this was :
Changed over from 4.1L/Alloy/manual to 5.8/Auto in 2 hrs. not including front springs of course

Cheers

Nigel

cheers mate, thanks for that, i take it you didnt have to cut and lengthen any of the headlight wires?

Sorry for the way overdue reply.

I had to do *many* many things.

I started with pulling the entire wiring harness out of the car and un-wrapping it, and working out where I wanted the individual wires to go. I then re-taped it where I wanted it.

From Memory : No rewiring the headlights directly, although because I ran them to relays the wiring changed anyway. I also used double-shielded welding cable to run the battery from the boot (almost 0 voltage drop) straight to the starter motor using more conduit : ran that from the boot to the shifter box through the car and then through a 25mm hole in the shifter box (the black box in the car that the shifters bolt to) tyhrough to the starter motor. Lots of work, but lotsa people loved it too.

Theres no issue with lengthening wiring : If you start with 2 * complete wiring harnesses your in good shape for amounts of wire.

I had a self-resetting circuit breaker and 3 * relays under the DS light (in front of the car, not behind..). The relays were : High beam, low beam, and horn.

makes a Huge difference to the lighting performance.

Cheers

Nigel

thanks mate, makes my life a lot easier when attempting this. seems to be a time taking thing to do but its well worth the effort i reckon. the wires just look s**t on the X series fords. would you have any pics of your engine bay?