The 60° angle makes it compact and more suitable for transverse mounting, but it is not ideally balanced—V8s are typically 90°—necessitating the use of a counter-rotating balance shaft.

Ford manufactured the aluminum engine blocks, using a patented Cosworth process, at their Windsor, Ontario plant, then shipped them to Japan for finishing by Yamaha.

Yamaha had used a relatively unusual method, called "swaging", of affixing the cam sprockets to the camshafts.

The preventive measure of welding the cam sprocket to the camshaft soon proved to be a fix for engines that had not suffered such a fate yet.

Ford issued a TSB (TSB 03-14-1) prescribing the application of Loctite to the cam sprocket to lengthen the life of the camshafts,[7] but as SHO owners have experienced cam failure after the application of Loctite,[8] most SHO enthusiasts do not recommend this fix.