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I normally try to avoid these discussions but since this has to do with a small bit of the historicity of the instrument, let me present the facts.
The LDG type guitar -D10 frame with pad - was my idea and inspiration. No guitar of this type existed before I went to Shot Jackson and David (his son) with the idea. They both said I was crazy, that it would ruin a perfectly good Sho-Bud double neck to do what I was suggesting. Shot said, "I'll build you anything you want; single, double or triple neck".
When I adamantly stood by my idea David reluctantly removed all of the C6th pedals and undercarriage from my double neck Baldwin Sho- Bud and put a rudimentary pad on the exposed wooden frame, carefully storing all the parts in a plastic bag, he and Shot being quite certain I would soon want them replaced. The removed parts weighed 18 pounds thereby validating my main reason for the initial idea, to lessen the weight. We had no cartage service in those days and I was carrying my steel and Fender amp into and out of the studios 3 to 4 times daily, sometimes 7 days a week, which we often recorded.
Immediately, steel players heard about this and started dropping by my recording sessions to see this weird new steel, which was a single neck......but not really.
Soon David and Shot were getting inquiries about building other players a steel like mine. Six months later they decided my crazy idea wasn't too bad a marketing one after all and decided to build a model with my name on it along with the Sho-Bud logo and a modest royalty for each one sold.
One day David and I sat down to discuss the name signature and decided one with initials was the simplest and least distracting from the Sho-Bud name and was the more practical way to do this.
I said, "Well, my initials are LLG so that's probably what should be on the model". After drawing the initials - David, who was a pretty good graphic artist - said it didn't look quite right esthetically (my word, not his). Now, I'm a pretty quick study and realized he wanted some connection to this thing since his crew was going to build it, so I immediately said," David, try a "D" for the middle letter and if it looks good to you, you can tell everybody the "D" stands for David and I'll say it means Dot (which it really did)".
He then drew LDG, looked at it for a few seconds, then looked at me and said, "I like this because a more rounded middle letter balances the look better".
With that, the LDG model was born and everybody lived happily ever after except no one realized how popular the model would become. The idea was never patented so ultimately, virtually every steel guitar manufacturer offered a padded model on double frame as an option without the necessity of paying a royalty.
For me, this is absolutely ok, since my idea merely involved a minor evolution of the steel guitar, and everyone who wants one of these today can get it without problems.

Lloyd Green

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